Rank #6 of 24·Data loss·26 Feb 2026·Claude Code
Claude Code runs terraform destroy, erasing 2.5 years of DataTalks.Club
Chaos index9.0 / 10
0246810
“The cleanup was cleaner than expected. So was the database.”
What happened
Migrating a side project, Alexey Grigorev let Claude Code manage Terraform. A missing state file led to duplicate resources; the agent unpacked an old state archive and proposed cleaning up with terraform destroy, which he approved. The production database, all automated snapshots, the VPC, ECS cluster and load balancers went with it — 1.9 million rows. AWS support found a hidden internal snapshot and recovered the data in 24 hours.
How to not be next
Never let an agent run destroy against shared state; separate accounts, deletion protection, and backups you've actually restored once.
Source: Spiceworks ↗