⚠️ GitLab rm -rf Disaster: 300GB Gone in Seconds

DevOps True Stories — Learn From the Biggest Failures in Tech

Author

Arbaz M
August 28, 2025

When One Command Destroys Production

In 2017, an engineer at GitLab typed: 

rm -rf

Within seconds, 300GB of production data vanished.
Backups? Corrupted.
Replication? Broken.
The entire platform was offline for hours — and thousands of developers watched the recovery unfold live.

What Happened

GitLab was fighting a spam attack.
To clean it up, an engineer logged into what he thought was a test server… but it was actually production.

He ran a cleanup command that recursively deleted the production database.

All automated backups failed — the only thing that saved them was a 6-hour-old snapshot.

The Debugging

Here’s the painful truth:

  • Backups are worthless if you don’t test them

  • Staging and production must be clearly separated

  • Automation should guard against destructive commands

  • Transparency builds trust — GitLab openly shared their recovery via Google Docs

📩 Want the exact demo script & code I used in this video (plus 23 more real-world DevOps failures you can recreate step by step)?
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📂 Takeaway Code Snippet

Safe demo of what happened (in a container): 

# Create fake production data
mkdir -p /tmp/prod/db
echo "user data" > /tmp/prod/db/users.db

# Disaster strikes
rm -rf /tmp/prod/db

# -> database gone
ls /tmp/prod/db
# ls: cannot access '/tmp/prod/db': No such file or directory

Terraform drift is annoying.
But rm -rf in production? Catastrophic.

▶️ Full Walkthrough

👉 I recorded the entire disaster + recovery simulation. Watch it here: https://youtu.be/KxTmIEkRiZ8

Why It Matters

GitLab’s mistake is a reminder for every engineer:

  • Always test your backups

  • Protect production with automation & review

  • Be transparent when incidents happen

Because when you lose production data, the world is watching.

👋 Final Note
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