Dev's Last-Day-Of-Contract Code Helped To Crash App Used By 350,000 People
The Register, Monday, November 24th, 2025
Customer signed off and a remaining staffer triggered the mess
Welcome to Monday morning and therefore to a new instalment of Who, Me? It's The Register's weekly column that shares your tales of workplace errors and absolution.
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Ray" who reached the end of a temporary contract working at what he described as "a major corporation."
Ray was ready to move on to whatever came next, when the mega-corp asked if he could do just one more day of work to troubleshoot a production issue. He kindly agreed and showed up again.
To address the issue, Ray needed a production database connection string - code that includes the name and address of a database, plus credentials to log onto it. He therefore copied the string into his configuration file and spent a few hours fixing the problem.