AI FAIL
An AI deleted an entire company’s database without asking
An AI coding agent reportedly deleted a company’s entire production database, briefly leaving customers unable to access important business records.
PocketOS, a software company for car rental businesses, had a major outage over the weekend after the AI tool allegedly wiped its database and backups in just 9 seconds.
The company was using Cursor, a coding agent running Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 model.
PocketOS founder Jer Crane said the agent was performing a routine task when it decided, without being asked, to “fix” an issue by deleting the entire database.
Crane said there was no confirmation step before the agent took action.
When asked what happened, the AI reportedly apologised and listed the safety rules it had broken.
The agent said it had ignored instructions not to run destructive commands unless clearly told to do so. It also admitted it guessed instead of checking first.
What’s worse, Crane learned that Railway backups are stored in the same location - meaning all the backups were wiped too.
The key points:
An AI coding agent reportedly deleted PocketOS’s database and backups.
Some customers temporarily lost access to reservations and signup data.
The data was later recovered, but the incident raised concerns about AI agents working inside live systems.
Nine seconds of terror
The outage affected rental businesses using PocketOS.
Some lost access to recent reservations, new customer signups, and other key data.
Crane said the incident shows a bigger issue: AI agents are being connected to live business systems faster than proper safety measures are being built around them.
Two days later, Crane said the data had been recovered.
Somewhere, a cybersecurity team just aged seven years reading this.- MG