Stack Overflow has said that Marco Marsala’s story about accidentally wiping out his whole company with a single line of code was a hoax.
In an Italian news report, Marsala said it was “just a joke”. According to the report, the hoax was a marketing stunt to promote Marsala’s company.
News of the hoax comes after Marsala posted a distress call on Stack Overflow’s Server Fault forum, saying that he had wiped out the data and backups of his 1,535 hosting clients.
“Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with an rm -rf {foo}/{bar}
with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line.”
“All servers got deleted and the off-site backups too, because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script)”.
Stack Overflow issued a statement saying that the Server Fault moderators had been in contact with Marsala about his post.
“As you can imagine, they’re not particularly amused by it,” said Stack Overflow.
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