The owner of a web hosting company who claimed to have deleted his entire company with one line of code revealed that it was a hoax.
Marco Marsala, an Italian entrepreneur, on Friday posted his faux coding mistake on Server Fault, a forum for server experts. Most of the users who responded to his query noted that it is unlikely that the entrepreneur will be able to recover the lost data.
"In the beginning [it] was just for fun," Marsala told CNBC on Monday, explaining that he took advantage of the media attention in order to advertise his new start-up and bring attention to a book that he is writing.
The fake query has since been edited by the forum to designate it as a hoax.
"The moderators on Server Fault have been in contact with the author about this, and as you can imagine, they're not particularly amused by it," Stack Overflow, which runs the Server Fault forum, said, according to The Telegraph.