Technology PSA – Part 1

This is the first in a series of technology-related public service announcements (PSAs) brought to you by CTO Nation.

The technology-related failures listed below were collected from a variety of companies. We hope you can learn from their cringe-inducing experiences. All company names and employee references have been removed to protect the innocent (and embarrassed):

“I found out the other day that we’ve been sending our marketing emails from Outlook for the past month because no one bothered to tell [the marketing intern] that we had a MailChimp account. We figured it out when an email was sent out using the “cc” feature. The hate mail we got back was not what we were shooting for on that marketing campaign.”

— Managing director, regional insurance brokerage

“I get at least two emails every week trying to sell me FREE cloud storage. But [my IT guy] wasn’t backing up Quickbooks correctly and we just lost most of our Q4 financial data when the office server crashed.”
— Controller, multi-unit hair salon

“Our domain registration still had [a former employee’s] email address so no one saw the renewal notices. It expired and someone in Belarus bought it and now we are trying to figure out how to get it back.”

— Owner, marketing firm

“We found out that [our IT guy] wasn’t actually doing any programming. His girlfriend was literally doing it for him at night. Our system went down one morning and when he had no idea where to look to see what was wrong, he finally had to come clean.”

— IT director, call center

“The programmers migrated our in-house order management system to new servers over the weekend. Somehow they missed one of the database connection settings and we didn’t catch it until the evening reports ran on Monday night. Some data was lost permanently and it took us almost a week to salvage the remaining data that was split across the old database and the new database.”
— Owner, building supplies company

This is just a small portion a fairly long list and we’ll share some of the others along the way. If you have any good ones to add to the list, send us an email with the details.