Screwed up..

snadam

bjaxx wrote:

snadam wrote:

I have accidentally made data unavailable via NTFS permissions to all users once before...and when I mean data, I mean all of it. And when I mean users, I mean all of them

Guilty as charged with you Snadam. Told them I was practicing best security practices.

lol, me too. The worst part is I normally do this kind of work off hours. But for some reason that day, I either had to do it or forgot people were working...it was kind of a double-whammy for stupidity

Psoasman

While not a computer uh-oh. I accidently turned off the projector for the Seahawks game in front of over 100 people, who immediately wanted to have me walk the plank....if they could have found one!

cnfuzzd

This guy was having a MUCH worse day.


John

Inside The UAL Story Debacle
James Erik Abels 09.08.08, 6:45 PM ET


At 10:53 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time Monday, a reporter at a Florida-based investor information service did a routine Google search and found a story saying United Airlines was declaring bankruptcy.

It seemed credible: It was from the Chicago Tribune and it was posted on the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, a sister paper also owned by Tribune. United Airlines parent company UAL (nasdaq: UAUA - news - people ), based in Chicago, has a long history of troubled finances.

He didn't call the company, but he did write up a headline, "United Airlines: Files for Ch. 11, to cut costs by 20%" and published it, not only to subscribers of the Income Securities Advisor, but also through Bloomberg terminals, to which ISA, in the parlance of the Internet news industry, aggregates its content.

Its impact on United's stock was swift and terrible. In the span of 10 minutes, 24 million shares changed hands. The stock, trading at $12.45, crashed to $3, according to Nasdaq. So severe was the market's response that Nasdaq halted trading from 11:06 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. The exchange says the rest of the day's trades will stand.

The problem, as most in the financial news industry and traders around the world now know, was that the story was six years old. The Chicago Tribune story ran Dec. 10, 2002, and appears to have been republished or resurfaced accidentally Sunday afternoon on the South Florida Sun-Sentinel's site.

How did it happen? That's a question of keen interest to United, its investors, regulators, and newsrooms struggling to deal with the exponential impact lightning-fast information delivery can have for both good and, in this case, very bad.

Of course this isn't the first such mistake that's punished an unsuspecting company. Just two weeks ago, Bloomberg published an obituary for Steve Jobs, Apple's (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) chief executive, in error. Jobs was still very much alive. Bloomberg noticed the error quickly and took the story down before it had a chance to roil Apple's stock.

UAL wasn't so lucky. Richard Lehmann, president of Income Securities Advisor, says his company aggregates news about distressed companies as an add-on subscription service for Bloomberg readers. Non-subscribers see a two-line summary of all of Lehmann's stories.

Minutes after the story was filed, Lehmann, a Forbes columnist, was alerted to a problem when non-subscribers jammed his switchboard with requests for the full text. "We're not in the business of providing fresh news," Lehmann says. "And consequently, we knew there was something wrong here." Lehmann said his employee was not negligent in picking up the Sun-Sentinel story because it had no date on it and appeared current beside new content tracking Hurricane Ike in the Southeastern U.S.

Bloomberg removed the story shortly after 11 a.m. Eastern and ran a follow-up at 11:06 a.m. Eastern, citing a United Airlines spokeswoman as saying the news was false. Lehmann's original text is no longer accessible. Bloomberg did not respond to calls for comment.

The situation touched off a scramble at the Chicago Tribune. When reached shortly after 11 a.m., Business Editor Micheal Lev said his staff was trying to figure out what was going on with United's stock. At the time, he knew nothing of the old Chicago Tribune story that had run in Florida. "We've written nothing on United Airlines today," said Lev.

Within a half hour of Lev's statements, Tribune (nyse: TRB - news - people ) had discovered the source of the story and contacted the Sun-Sentinel to take it down. "I literally just got word a couple minutes ago that there was problem," said Joe Schwerdt, deputy managing editor-interactive, at the time. He declined to discuss details about how his paper publishes stories on weekends. By 3:17 p.m. Monday, Schwerdt was quoted in a Chicago Tribune story saying that he still did not know what had happened.

In a statement, Tribune said the story was located in the archive section of the Sun Sentinel's site, and "contains information that would clearly lead a reader to the conclusion that it was related to events in 2002. In addition, the comments posted along with the story are dated 2002." Another potential tip-off: The URL of the story contains date information, a common tell for the Web-savvy about the true publication time of online material.

But the original publication date is nowhere to be found on the story. The only date listed anywhere on either the Chicago Tribune's version or on The Sun Sentinel's was today's--Sept. 8, 2008. This may have led to the mistake.

It seems the story may have resurfaced on either the business page or the home page of Sunsentinel.com at roughly 12:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time Sunday, according to SmartBrief.com, a Washington, D.C.-based news aggregator that automatically scrapes 500 to 1,000 news sites hourly, looking for information about numerous market sectors, including aviation.

A review of its database identified the original source of the story as the newspaper's front Web page or its front business page, says Chris McNeilly, vice president of technology at SmartBrief.com.

His system only picks up fresh headlines or so-called "related links" on the sites SmartBrief's software crawls--they don't even look at archives. Neither the front page nor the front business page of the Sun-Sentinel site displays related links.

While SmartBrief's Web site showed the Sun-Sentinel story today along with a time stamp, an e-mail newsletter the company edits for subscribers did not. The editor who prepares it around 5 a.m. decided the Sun-Sentinel story seemed fishy, and decided to keep it out.

"Technology gets you so far, but then our human editors make the final decisions for publication,” says McNeilly.

Beleaguered United Airlines reported a $2.7 billion loss for the June quarter. Like other major carriers, it is trying to navigate high fuel prices and a bumpy economy by cutting capacity out of the marketplace and squeezing more revenue from each seat.

It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December 2002 and emerged from it in 2006. Despite its struggles, the company has given no indication it plans another bankruptcy filing.

Earlier today, United said it was launching an investigation into the Sun-Sentinel story, calling the posting "irresponsible." United has demanded a retraction.

Pash

Accept the Humility of it all Mrock4, you admitted fault, corrected it and will know what to looks out for in the future.

Remember folks, we are all cowboys but just some better cowboys than others

blargoe

I frequently have a bunch of remote desktop sessions to servers connected on my computer. I have been known to not be paying attention before and reboot the wrong server in the middle of the day.

Slowhand

XtreemeChaos wrote:

My boss always tells me that "every 'oops' cancels out ten 'atta-boys'" which, unfortunately, is very very true.

That's eerie. I had a boss that used to say the same thing. . . constantly.

Slowhand

FadeToBright wrote:

nicklauscombs wrote:

keep your head up, everyone has to have a bad day every now and then

+1 for this. Relax, people will forget about it by next week.

Of course they will. Next week is a brand-new start, and an opportunity for new screw-ups to overshadow the old.

Mishra

I'm lucky because I haven't caused any kind of wide outage before. I'm usually pretty nervous even to this day in a data center. Some of my admins just walk in and start some cable clean up on a rack... I won't touch it. However I've definitely broke individual servers. My favorite is when I went to turn the information light on the Dell server and I ended up pushing the power button honestly thinking in my brain that I'm pushing the right button.

But my favorite story is a stupid admin we had at Insight. He was trying to take out an old rack and couldn't get the power cord out. So he braces himself up against the floor tile perimeter and grabs onto the rack power cable. He starts pulling as hard as he can and of course rips out 2 entire racks of power.... WOW

Then when someone asks him "So what happened?" he said "...I... I'm going to have to think about this and get back to you". LOL So basically he had to go think of a lie before responding.

RussS

Mrock4 - don't sweat it man ...... crap happens once and a while.


I wont list all the cock-ups I have made over the years, but was visiting a relative at his work once and watched a guy working on overhead lines drop a tool into a power transformer that had the cover off for a cooling issue and took out the power for a city of 100K people


What does however define a tradesman is that they learn from their mistakes and do not make the same mistake twice.