The crash of Windows OS-driven systems around the world reminds me of an incident

The crash of Windows OS-driven systems around the world reminds me of an incident I had in my previous organization. 

I was the project manager of a small project with about 10 developers. The client was and is one of the biggest companies in India. We were in the last week before the project go-live. All coding was completed and just awaiting client sign-off. It was a Friday. We all went home happy as Monday was our sign-off date. 

One of the network support guys ran a patch we were on Windows 2007 server. It was the wrong patch for the build. All the developers were using desktops which were connected to the network. At the end of the day, we usually left PCs on while monitors would be switched off. This wrong patch corrupted every system we had.

The tech lead called me on Saturday, he had come to the office just to check everything was fine and discovered this problem. I reached the office; we took all the computers off the network. It was too late as we lost our entire code. Even the backup server was corrupted! As PM, I used a laptop, on which I had a week-old copy of the code. The tech lead took the copy from my laptop, and we started the process of adding the old code to our Visual Studio server. 

Luckily, one member of the team had switched off his PC while going home. I remember how we jumped at this news. We disconnected the machine from the network and ran it to check the code was from Friday. It was. First we copied it to my laptop. Took backups on other machines and finally, by the end of the day, we got everything back in order.

I think they fired that support guy, but we were too busy restoring the code to get more details. On Monday, we got the sign off and the client, to this day, has no idea what happened over the weekend.

Moral of the story:Do not push builds/patches on Fridays or before holidays. Even better, switch to Linux OS 😊