A frustrated and overworked employee of a company dismantles the server of his company. While he skillfully gets away with it, in the end, everyone at Microsoft sees him as the culprit for the problems.
The employee reports that he was responsible for the IT system and the computers in his company. This is reported by the online magazine The Register, which interviewed the employee. Since his company showed little interest in the computers, the computers of his company were hopelessly outdated and neglected. For this reason, he and a colleague began to gradually clean up and revitalize all systems with software that could clean up all the old computers of the company.
To do this, they used an unspecified software that could “clean up the registry of a Windows PC and remove a lot of junk from caches and similar things.”
However, the problems did not stop there. Because not only the computers but also the main production server was prone to errors. The server was old and no one had taken care of the IT infrastructure for years. And now he was supposed to modernize the server. But that went pretty wrong.
Our title image is a symbolic image.
Employee uses wrong software to upgrade the server
The employee himself explained that the whole situation was quite chaotic. He was overworked, tired, and exhausted and now had to deal with such a large project. In hindsight, that was not a good idea.
Because he “in a moment of madness” used the same program for the server that he had previously used for the normal computers. And that was the big mistake. He himself explained that his mistake was not surprising:
I was also at the end after working for months of mindless overtime to replace dying systems, deal with uncooperative users and grumpy managers, and handle the work of about five people.
What happened then? A short time later, the calls began. The websites were no longer functioning, and file sharing on the server also failed. The employee himself logged into the server and had to realize that “all file mappings and file types had disappeared and even the elements of the user interface were disappearing before our eyes.”
What was the problem? The software he used for the Windows PCs was intended for offline systems. But the employee used the software to update a live server. And that was bound to go wrong. Because the software simply wasn’t meant for that.
External company to handle the problem, blame placed on Microsoft
How did the matter end? They sought the support of an external company that deals with the maintenance and monitoring of such tasks. And the company stated: they had never seen anything like it. The entire server registry had disappeared, and they wanted to know if anyone had done anything that could have devastated the server.
The employee stated that he took a deep breath and then answered “no.” This relieved him and he went home while the service provider spent the whole night recovering the server and cursing the name Microsoft. However, the culprit was found elsewhere:
- In the end, IT management was blamed.
- IT blamed the finance department for not providing enough money for proper hardware.
- And everyone blamed Microsoft, as their software was installed on the server.
No one thought about the employee who had used the wrong software anymore.
More strange ideas from employees: A former engineer is fired by his employer. After his employer took disciplinary action against him and fired him, he used his network access to damage the internal IT systems of his former employer:
