On Friday, the Internet was abuzz with the news of a man deleting his company and clients' websites with a single command. Turns out that it was a hoax and the company did it as a promotional activity.
It was reported that server hosting company Genoa hosting's owner deleted their and 1535 client websites with one simple linux command. The company later told an Italian newspaper Repubblica that it was a joke. And all of this was a part of a guerrilla marketing campaign to promote the start-up.
Marco Marsala posted on the website 'Server Fault' on Friday for help after the debacle under the username 'bleemboy'. As the Engadget reported, many of the replies were very harsh. Some of the users suggested that this kind of behaviour is unprofessional and the company should go out of the business.
"Normally I use this script to delete the specific files. It is a very famous Linux command 'rm -rf'. Due to the 'f' part, there is no warning while deleting. Something went wrong and all the files were deleted including the offsite backups and the server files", he saidin a forum.
"The command that I mentioned in the article is harmless but it seems that almost no one has noticed. Now we have 140K people monitoring our scripts," Marsala said in Repubblica.
"Backups need to be offsite, offline, and incremental that you could delete them from your main server means they weren't what I would call backups," suggested Tim from the forums.
Last year an employee was fired from the company after she deleted company's tracking app from the phone.
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