[Editor's note: A man seeking publicity for his start-up and a book falsely claimed that a line of bad code deleted his entire company. Read the update here.]
The owner of a web hosting company may have just deleted his entire company with one line of code.
Marco Marsala accidentally ran a destructive code on his computer that deleted everything on his device, including all of his customers' websites, according to a report in The Independent.
Marsala posted his coding mistake on Server Fault, a forum for server experts.
"I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers," Marsala wrote. "Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script...All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script)."
Most of the users who responded to his query noted that is unlikely that the entrepreneur will be able to recover the lost data. The forum didn't name the company, and CNBC could not independently confirm Marsala's claim.
"If you really don't have any backups I am sorry to say but you just nuked your entire company," a user named André Borie wrote on the forum.