Your biggest fail of all time

[Paul B]

To complement the "Your fail today" thread, this one is for your biggest fail(s) ever.

I've had a few but one of my worst was not long after I had joined a new mobile phone company called Orange in 1994.

I wrote some code for an exchange in London (global title translation for anyone who's interested) but I entered 1 digit incorrectly....

The result was as soon as the code was entered, it caused an infinite loop between several exchanges which took down the network in London.
The outage was that bad (12 hours) it made the front page of The Sunday Times

In my defence, I did tell my boss I thought it was my code but he didn't believe me so was chasing the wrong thing for most of the day.

Still, it wasn't as bad as the guy in Milan, Italy who removed the working CPU instead of the spare whilst I was doing an upgrade of Omnitel's network, and took out northern Italy for over half a day.

 

[steven s]

I'm not willing to discuss it here, but let me just say it involved a large consumption of Tanqueray and Tonic. And a large sum of money.
Oh not that kinds of fail?
Well there was this one time I thought I could transfer a database by linecode.
I did, but the wrong way. I wrote over my live database with an old backup.

 

[glorify]

Getting married at 19 lol.

On my second at this point, now age 41. A lot smarter now (I think )

 

[runic]

mine is a toss up between two I will let you all say what one because to me they are about equal.

1. This is similar to Brogans, but I almost causing Marks and Spencers £30 million due to incorrect number on new product luckily they called me and asked if I was sure that the G wasnt a C (glad I said oops my mistake poor handwriting)

2. While dating my then gf, telling my ex I still have feelings for her, then when she asks me out stating I would need to break up with my gf (my ex and my gf at the time hate each other and still do), ruined any chance of getting back with her

 

[ManagerJosh]

Would buying a vBulletin 4 license count?

 

[jonsidneyb]

Would buying a vBulletin 4 license count?

Yes

 

[Hannah_M]

Would buying a vBulletin 4 license count?

That takes the cake.

 

[Elizabeth]

Reinstalling a script and not backing up the database beforehand. I lost my entire store and had to completely redo everything.

Buying vb4 suite.

 

[dutchbb]

In my first year as an administrator, I had poor security on my pc and someone got my passwords and hacked my domain name control panel. Because they changed the DNS, the forum was not accessible for two to three days for some users.

PS: also, buying three vb4 publishing suites.