💲The Multi-Billion Dollar IT Blunders

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When IT Mistakes Break the Bank

Every IT pro knows the sinking feeling: you press a button, miss a detail, or trust the wrong contractor. Suddenly thousands, even millions, are gone. From misconfigured servers to billion-dollar corporate fails, IT history is littered with costly mistakes.

We asked the community about the most expensive IT mistakes they’ve ever seen. The answers ranged from hilarious to horrifying, but all had lessons worth remembering.

Here’s a curated collection of the best (and worst). Plus, a few key takeaways to keep your budget safe.

💸 Hall of Fame: The Biggest IT Blunders

Before we get started on some of the best respones from the community, let’s remind ourselves of some of the biggest IT blunders of all time (in no specific order).

1. 🎯💳 Target – 2013 Data Breach

• Cost: Approximately $200 million in direct and indirect expenses.

• Details: Hackers accessed Target's network via a third-party vendor, compromising 40 million credit card numbers.

• Source: Red River

2. 🏦🔓 Equifax – 2017 Data Breach

• Cost: At least $575 million, potentially up to $700 million in settlements.

• Details: A failure to patch a known vulnerability exposed personal data of 147 million people.

• Source: Federal Trade Commission

3. 💸⚡ Knight Capital – 2012 Trading Glitch

• Cost: $440 million in 45 minutes.

• Details: A software error led to unintended trades, nearly bankrupting the firm.

• Source: Henrico Dolfing

4. 🚀🧮 NASA – Mars Climate Orbiter (1999)

• Cost: $327 million.

• Details: A unit conversion error between metric and imperial systems caused the orbiter to crash.

• Source: Wikipedia

5. 🛡️💥 CrowdStrike – 2024 Global IT Outage

• Cost: ~$5.4 billion in direct losses; market cap drop of $20 billion.

• Details: Faulty configuration update to Falcon sensor software caused system-wide crashes and boot loops, disrupting airlines, banking, healthcare, and retail operations globally.

• Source: Reuters | InformationWeek

6. 👥📂 Facebook (Meta) – Cambridge Analytica Scandal (2018)

• Cost: $5 billion fine from the FTC.

• Details: Improper data handling allowed a political consulting firm to access 87 million users' data.

• Source: The Guardian

💬 From the Trenches: Costly Mistakes in the Wild

It’s not just NASA and Wall Street that rack up expensive IT mistakes. Our own community shared stories that prove even “small” errors can spiral into big-dollar problems. There’s loads of great ones, but here are some highlights:

💸 Ben C.
“Using VMware and getting fisted by Broadcom’s new innovative price structure.”
👉 Sometimes the costliest mistake is trusting the vendor to keep prices stable.

😂 Robert D.
“So this one time, I saw this guy voluntarily go into the IT field as a career.”
👉 Maybe the most expensive mistake of all is signing up for this line of work in the first place.

🔌 Eric T.
“I was auditing my site’s server room and had floor tiles pulled up. I explained to a coworker that I was labeling cables to decommission properly. Got pulled into a call, came back, and he proudly said he was ‘done’… by cutting random wires. Whole building went down. Cost tens of thousands in repairs and days of interruption.”
👉 A reminder that “helping hands” without context can become a six-figure mistake.

🌍 Anonymous Member 456
“Deleting the entirety of DNS and backups over a 10,000 employee, 80-location enterprise.”
👉 No DNS, no business. A mistake that echoes through every department.

💀 Alex GB.
“I once setup RDP on a server with DMZ enabled on the firewall 😓. I had to buy Bitcoin a few weeks later to pay up the ransomware...”
👉 Security misconfigurations aren’t just mistakes — they’re ransomware invitations.

📞 Mauricio R.
“The dude in charge of the new PBX signed it off, planning to change the admin password the next day. Overnight, it got hacked and used to call Uganda all night long: $17,000 phone bill 🤣”
👉 If you’re going to change a password “tomorrow,” do it today.

⚡ Karissa M.
“Doing a generator test when the datacenter capacity wasn’t calculated correctly. The exchanger melted, UPS failed, raw power spiked — nearly 1000 servers fried.”
👉 Datacenter physics don’t forgive optimism.

🚜 Joshua S.
“A backhoe took out a manufacturer’s fiber. Company couldn’t sell $1.5M worth of product to the customer down the hall. Bad day doesn’t even cover it.”
👉 IT disasters aren’t always digital — sometimes they’re diesel-powered.

🖥 Chris I.
“Supported a financial management company with several locations. Each had its own independent server stack — no networking. File sharing was done by thumbdrive courier. Easily 50k per location wasted, plus huge productivity loss.”
👉 Sometimes the biggest IT mistake is refusing to modernize.

💾 Tristian S.
“I deleted half the doctors’ credentials and NPI numbers out of the EMR. No patients seen for nearly 3 days. The company lost nearly $1M. The KB article’s wording saved me.”
👉 Ambiguity in documentation can be more costly than the deletion itself.

🎥 Alex M.
“Setting up a conference, someone plugged a wrong voltage power supply into an HDMI splitter. Since HDMI has no protection, it bricked 4x $7k projectors and every connected device. Only two HDMI Decimators survived.”
👉 One cheap part can nuke an entire AV budget.

Read more!

🕰️ The Silent Killers: Long-Term Mistakes

Some mistakes don’t explode overnight — they just quietly drain budgets:

• Hosted Desktops Disaster: One company replaced PCs with thin clients. Performance tanked, costs skyrocketed. For the same money, they could’ve given every employee a $1,000 laptop every two years.

• Sentinel Spend: “Wasting £230k a year on Sentinel logs.” Enough said.

• Cutting Security Budgets: Multiple members pointed out CIOs who repeatedly cut cybersecurity spend. Result? Breaches, zero-days, constant firefighting.

• The Human Factor: One member said: “Me… staying in the same job for too many years.” Sometimes the costliest mistake is personal, not technical.

👉 Long-term underinvestment is just as dangerous as short-term mistakes.

😂 Comic Relief: IT Humor

Some answers weren’t about dollars at all — but they nailed the spirit of IT pain:

• “Marriage.”

• “So this one time, I saw this guy voluntarily go into the IT field as a career.”

• “Buying 2 servers without any need.”

• “A degree I don’t use.”

• “They hired ME!”

👉 Sometimes laughter is the only patch.

Case Study: Azure SQL — The Accidental Gold-Plated Service

A team spun up Azure SQL services with “stupidly powerful” settings and forgot about it for a week. Even unused, it cost thousands. Microsoft eventually credited them.

• The cost: unnecessary thousands.

• The lesson: Cloud services run until you stop them. Always review configs and billing.

💸 Our Money-Saving Recommendation

When the dust settles, most of these disasters come down to lack of visibility. Two free, open-source tools that every IT pro should keep in their kit:

• 🔎 Nmap — Don’t wait for attackers to tell you what’s open on your network. Nmap gives you visibility into your own exposure before mistakes go live.

• 🦠 VirusTotal — Free, quick, and easy. Upload suspicious files, hashes, or URLs to check against dozens of antivirus engines. It takes seconds and can save you thousands.

👉 Both are free, battle-tested, and used daily by pros.

✅ How to Avoid Multi-Million Dollar Mistakes

A quick checklist for IT pros (and their bosses):

1. Document Everything

   • Change logs, rollback plans, and test environments aren’t optional.

   • Most “oops” moments happen when nobody wrote things down.

2. Test Before You Touch Prod

   • Always validate changes in staging first.

   • A $0 VM in a sandbox can save millions.

3. Enforce Least Privilege

   • Don’t give everyone admin.

   • One fat-fingered rm -rf shouldn’t take out the company.

4. Automate Backups (and Test Restores)

   • A backup is only as good as your ability to restore it.

   • Schedule test recoveries quarterly.

5. Learn From Others’ Failures

   • Postmortems, case studies, and community stories are free lessons.

   • Better to laugh at someone else’s mistake than cry over your own.

📌 Print this checklist and stick it on the NOC wall — your CFO will thank you later 😉 

🎯 Closing Thoughts

IT mistakes will never disappear. Complexity, pressure, and human error mean that somewhere, right now, a cable is being cut, a password is being left at default, or a config is being YOLO’d into production.

But the best we can do is learn from each other’s mistakes — and share them, so fewer dollars go up in smoke next time.

Got your own expensive mistake to share? Join in on the conversation!

P.S. Yesterday, we did a livestream about backup and recovery. If you missed it, rewatch here: https://www.youtube.com/live/0-5_t8Jdzc8

We’d appreciate if you dropped us a sub, so you don’t miss future streams!

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