Techie Banned From Client Site For Outage He Didn't Cause
The Register, Monday, January 12th, 2026
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as 'Patrick' who told us he once installed an extra shelf of storage for a NAS at a local council office in Australia. The job initially went well. 'The staff left me alone in the computer room while I was tidying up the paperwork,' Patrick wrote. While he handled that administrivia, something caught Patrick's eye.
'Both consoles were open on my laptop and I suddenly noticed both controllers were reporting network ports going down.' Not long after, the whole NAS died and brought the council's servers down with it.
Members of the council's tech team rushed in and demanded to know what Patrick had done.
He had done nothing, but something tripped a breaker on one of the local government's uninterruptible power supplies (UPSes), which was the reason the NAS failed.