Do you have a story to tell? April 27th is National Tell a Story day

In my first job out of college (early days of the dotcom; back in the 1900's) I was an analyst on a floor of about 40-60 UNIX developers, architects, analysts, etc. All working together on a big enterprise product®® with an early, yet ROBUST version control system.

Anyway, a friend of mine, entry level UNIX Build Admin was doing some maintenance and cleaning up directories - as one does. He navigated ../../../ <return> and without noticing where that landed him
typed

rm -f *.* 

There may have even been a -r in there but I'm not sure that mattered much because he was in the main root directory.
For anyone here who doesn't know command line unix...
     rm = Remove
     -f = 'force' (don't ask any further questions)
     star dot star = wildcard filename . wildcard filetype (all of them)

The effect was nearly instant - dev-gopher-heads popped up in all the cubes and the last 3hrs of that day was largely ineffective for most devs and *really busy* for the build team. Luckily the lead on that team was pretty much a rockstar and he was able to restore the entire build structure that was deleted up to within like an hour before the rm command. Nearly everyone was back and running right where they were by the next morning.

It probably could have been worse - what made it so memorable was how it was almost like a power-outage; so fast.

----
®® customizing the absolute bejeezus out of the thing...they may still be working on it honestly. I worked there for about 5 years of an 18month project that was probably only 1/2 way done when all the contractors (like me) were released one month after 9/11. Taught me a lifelong lesson about customizing enterprise software. 🤔🤔🤔