AWS permanently nuked a 10-year customer account—data, backups, everything—after a payment verification failed. That alone broke their own 90-day retention policy. It gets messier.
Looks like an internal script meant to run as a “dry run” went full send in production. Blame a Java CLI parsing edge case for turning a harmless test into actual deletion.
The kicker? The customer had done everything right: multi-region backups, redundancy, the works. None of it mattered. AWS’s internal misstep and a black-box support process left them with zero recovery options.
System shift: Cloud resilience isn’t just about redundant disks. It’s about factoring in your provider as a failure point too.
