Editor's note: This story was subsequently proven to be a hoax. You can read our follow-up coverage here.

Dive Brief:

• A web hosting provider deleted his entire company and his clients' data with a single line of code, according to The Telegraph.  
• In an online forum, the hosting provider Marco Marsala sought advice for how to remedy his error after running a destructive line of code. 
• Not only had Marsala wiped his servers, he also deleted his backups. The backup drives were mounted to the computer he had accidently wiped, so in one fell swoop he lost everything. 

Dive Insight:

"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," wrote Marco Marsala. "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."

According to an explanation from The Telegraph, the line of code in question stems from the command "rm -rf /". The command essentially instructs a computer to ignore standard warnings and delete everything it is commanded to. 

It was a comedy of errors that led to Marsala deleting both his and his customers' data. Many organizations can recover from a faulty line of code, but not when their backups are also compromised.

"This is not bad luck: it's astonishingly bad design reinforced by complete carelessness," one user wrote in the forum. 

Most on the online forum doubted whether he could ever recover the data. It would take the expensive expertise of a data recovery company to extract the deleted data, but even then the results are not guaranteed, users wrote. 

"You're going out of business," wrote Michael Hampton in the forum. "You don't need technical advice, you need to call your lawyer."