Former interns at tech companies fess up on Quora about the disasters they caused Apparently, interns love accidentally unplugging things.
The classic "uh, sorry about that":
I brought down Facebook Messenger for nine minutes. Oops.
-- Anonymous
The "sorry your card was declined, my bad":
Knocked an entire credit bureau out of service for a weekend while reconfiguring their system for them. I'm being kinda vague here, yes. Lots of people couldn't buy on credit that weekend.
The ol' "kicked out the power cord to all the servers":
I used to intern at a national hotel chain at the corporate headquarters. While sitting at my desk, I put my feet up on some wires and cables and such. A few hours later, the servers in the building went down, and the 3,000 employees in the building could not log into the database and it may have been tied into all the hotels, reservations etc.
While researching the issue, an Engineer went into my cubicle, and flipped a power strip under my desk which apparently had all the servers plugged into it on the other side of the wall.
Basically, my foot hit the power switch and downed all the servers.
The "nearly killed thousands of people":
I was doing research at London's Heathrow Airport, working in a room just below the control tower.
We were listening to the control tower instructions and timing how long the pilots took to respond.
My colleague left for lunch one day having turned his radio onto 'broadcast' by accident. As radio is one way, it meant that no one was able to send or receive messages on the frequency that was being used to give take off permission.
I returned back to my desk and started to eat my lunch to discover that all departures from the airport had been brought to a standstill by someone who sounded like they were eating their lunch.
The realisation that it was the sound of MY lunch being eaten hit me about 10 minutes later. I rushed over and flicked the switch to off, and one of the busiest international airports in the world started to work again.