News about Company Deletion through One Corrupt Line of Code is Just a Hoax — He trolled the whole Internet.
On ServerFault forum, a user namely one Marco Marsala claimed via posting a message that he needs assistance from other users about an issue. He stated that he operated a small-scale hosting company and had about 1535 clients. But one fateful day he himself got the entire data of his company deleted after running a Bash script. The script, as per his claims, was bugged. Moreover, he had run out of options for restoring his data because the buggy code deleted all backup files too.
Users, naturally, felt touched and tried their best to assist him. However, it was a unanimous feeling that now that even the backup files have been deleted, there isn’t much that could be done for recovering the data.
The news of an entrepreneur deleting his company with just one bad code line spread like wildfire and very soon local and international media was publishing the story.
But the recent turn of events has suggested that this story was merely fictional and thus, a hoax. It became apparent from the interview the man in question gave to Repubblica, an Italian news agency. He explained that the incident never occurred at all and his supposed company wasn’t deleted. In fact, he went on to admit that he was only joking and explained that this was just another “guerrilla marketing operation.” This means it was a publicity stunt for his seemingly low-profile company.
The man explained that he wanted to advertise his server management services startup and he deemed that spreading false news would generate popularity for his company. After all, fame is fame no matter what route it and through which tactic it comes from. The man also made clear to the public that the alleged malicious code was also pretty harmless and that it was the observational incapability of the users who saw his post on the forum and did not sense anything fishy. Yet we cannot fully evaluate how far his marketing efforts have helped his company but he certainly has garnered criticism from all across the world for such notorious strategy.
Such as, ServerFault team wasn’t at all amused by this incident. In their official statement, the admin stated:
“It turns out that the recent question regarding the misuse of rm -rf in Ansible was actually just a hoax in some kind of viral marketing effort. It became quite famous in various media and gathered a large number of views. Since I don’t think we should allow ServerFault to be abused in such a way, I deleted the question once I learned about the hoax.”
