My old auto-fill script crashed our whole database last Tuesday

I thought I'd save time by reusing a Python script from 3 years ago and it somehow dropped 14,000 customer records before I caught it. Has anyone else had old code come back to bite them when you least expect it?

2 comments

2 Comments

ivanlewis1mo agoMost Upvoted

Yeah I read somewhere that old scripts are like ticking time bombs.

joseph4481mo ago

Wait "dropped 14,000 customer records" - are you serious? That's not just a script crashing, that's basically setting the office on fire. I audibly choked on my coffee reading that number. A three year old Python script just casually deleting fourteen thousand customer records is the kind of nightmare that keeps me up at night. I honestly don't know how you kept your job after that, or even how you got the database back up. I've had old code fail before but nothing even close to that level of destruction. You must have been sweating bullets when you realized what happened.