This is a remarkable mistake:

I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers. Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with a rm -rf {foo}/{bar} with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line.

All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script).

In a nutshell, one bad command erased all his customers’ data as well as all his backups.

Wow.

UPDATE: The story was a viral campaign. Words cannot express how much I hate this. Here’s the Snopes link, if you want the details