Incident·WS-0088·Feb 26, 2026·in the wild·Agent accidents

Claude Code wipes a production database and its backups

Anthropic Claude Code; Alexey Grigorev / DataTalks.Club

46/100
WS-3 Serious
Harm score 40, signal score 53. Autonomy: autonomous (the AI ran multi-step operations). How the scores work.
Harm 2/5
damage actually done
Reach 2/5
who was affected
Autonomy 3/4
how much the AI did on its own
Novelty 1/5
how new the behavior was
Permanence 2/5
how hard it is to undo

A developer was migrating a site to shared AWS infrastructure and had Claude Code run Terraform. The state file was missing at first; after the developer supplied it, the agent ran a destroy against production. That removed the VPC, the RDS database with about 2.5 years of course data, and its automated snapshots. AWS support restored the data from an internal snapshot about a day later.

Damage

production outage ~24h; ~1.94M rows (2.5 years, 100k+ users) deleted then restored

The capability behind it

Sources

Tom's Hardware, second source. Evidence confidence: medium. One secondary source dates this 26 Feb 2025, apparently a typo. The Thursday-night timing and March 2026 coverage (Tom's Hardware, 7 Mar 2026) point to 26 Feb 2026. The developer's post-mortem blames his own over-reliance and missing safeguards.

Factor ratings and the score are this index’s judgments by a published formula; facts, dates and figures come from the linked sources. Where a lawsuit is pending, the summary reports allegations, not findings.