The Company Deleted by One Line of Code Was a Hoax!

Yesterday we reported that a man had mistakenly deleted his entire company using just one line of faulty code. Now it turns out that the entire thing appears to have been made up by the poster as a publicity stunt.

Marco Marsala posted on the Server Fault forums asking for help earlier this week, explaining that his careless use of the “rm -rf” command in Unix had caused him to accidentally delete the contents of all of his servers, including the backups. The story became incredibly popular online and was reported by a number of major news sources as well as garnering a large number of responses to his original post, with a variety of sympathy, pity, and derision.

On Friday, the post was deleted by Stack Overflow, the parent forum of Server Fault and later a post made by a moderator, Sven, brought to light that the story was, in fact, a hoax. The poster, Sven, a Server Fault moderator, pointed to an Italian news report that detailed that the story was part of a marketing stunt by Marsala in order to promote his company and gain visibility. Marsala told the paper that the whole thing was “just a joke”. A statement by Stack Overflow revealed they did not find it quite as funny, saying “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.”

In many ways, it could be surprising how many people believed the story, especially on a forum populated almost entirely by those knowledgeable in technology. It is yet to be decided how Server Fault will deal with the hoax topic, with Sven currently allowing the community in question to decide its fate.