It was All a Marketing Stunt
The Italian ISP that deleted all of its servers… yeah, apparently… not so much.
Late last week, the owner of a small web hosting company in Italy said he “accidentally” executed some bad maintenance code on his servers, and they deleted all his servers.
Marco Marsala headed to a support forum and posted a cry for help claiming he made a big mistake,
“I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1,535 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 with a rm -rf {foo}/{bar} with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line.
“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).”
He got some sympathetic replies. However, most of the forum users basically told him he was an idiot and that since (as he further explained) that all of his onsite and offsite backup drives were also mounted to his servers at the time of execution, all of the sites that he ran (again, approximately 1535) all got permanently and irrevocably deleted.
Apparently, the delete was so destructive, that many users didn’t think that even an experienced data recovery company would be able to retrieve his data.