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A web host appears to have accidently wiped the entire computer network for his company and its clients, obliterating his business in the process.

Hosting provider Marco Marsala accidently instructed his computer to delete everything stored on his servers, removing all of his own company data and that of his 1,535 customers.

After running the destructive code on his own network, Marsala turned to Server Fault, a forum for server experts, to seek assistance for how he might recover his lost data.

Unfortunately, instead of a workable solution, one after another, the experts told him, "your company is now essentially dead".

The problem command was 'rm -rf', a piece of code that will delete everything it is instructed to. The 'rm' portion tells the computer to remove; the r deletes everything within a select directory; and the f stands for 'force', instructing the computer to ignore the standard warning notifications that come when deleting critical files.

Usually, this piece of code would be used only to wipe specific directories that it was directed it. But because Marsala made an error in his selection, he managed to accidently instruct the computer to wipe everything.

"I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1,535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers," wrote Marsala on the forum.

"Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with a rm -rf {foo}/{bar} with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line."

In a situation such as this, the natural expectation would be for a hosting provider to reach for its system-wide backup. But it seemed that Marsala had managed to lose that, too.

"All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script)."

Source: Hosting provider accidently obliterates his company with one line of bad code