Sometimes the biggest mistakes happen when you think you’re doing everything by the book.

So, what would you do if you were working on a simple demo setup, but suddenly realized the configuration you pushed went straight into a live environment? Would you panic? Or get right to work on a fix?

In the following story, an apprentice finds themselves in this situation and changes the company policy forever.

That time we accidentally bricked the CEO’s parents’ clinic network

I’m doing an apprenticeship at a company that manages networks for medical practices. Both our office and all the practices we support run on Unifi gear.

One of those clients just happens to be the CEO’s parents, whose clinic is literally right next door. Their network is set up behind our office network.

One day, a colleague was tasked with setting up a demo server rack. Plug a laptop into the Unifi Dream Machine via LAN, WiFi off just to be safe, load up a backup image, add it to Enterprise Management, done.

It turns out they didn’t do it right.

Except… not done.

After the backup was supposedly restored, we disconnected the LAN and tried to reach the UDM’s web interface through the management portal. But it just didn’t appear. So we kept poking at it, scratching our heads over what was wrong.

That’s when the clinic next door, the CEO’s parents’ clinic, suddenly lost their entire network.

Turns out the UDM’s web interface we’d been happily messing with wasn’t the demo unit in our rack, nor the one providing internet to the rack from our own office.

Now, they have safeguards in place so it never happens again.

Nope, we’d somehow managed to connect straight into the CEO’s parents’ live production system, which was also conveniently named exactly like our backup, so we didn’t notice, and pushed the backup image there.

Needless to say, nobody was particularly amused.

Since that day, we have used a separate Unifi account, which can only manage demo and other clients’ networks, not the company network or the clinics’ networks.

Yikes! That must’ve been pretty stressful for everyone.

Let’s check out what the people over at Reddit think about this situation.

Probably not.

Good point.

The story reminds this person of something else.

This person thinks they know where the whole problem started.

Mistakes do happen!

Hopefully, they were able to get it fixed pretty quickly, and no information was put at risk.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.