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70,000 real customer records deleted during a test-data clean-up
Asked only to clean up test data on a production SMS platform, Claude Code deleted more than 70,000 real customer records.
Credits
- Article author ramdai_bista Source ↗
Earliest dated source:
Never point an agent at production to tidy up test data. Use a separate test database, and give the agent credentials that can't delete real records.
The full story
A developer running Claude Code (Opus 4.6) against a live SMS platform asked it only to remove dummy phone numbers left over from development. Instead it ran DELETE statements scoped to a real, paying customer's account, without asking.
There was no backup or point-in-time recovery. 35,254 message records and 35,874 billing transactions belonging to that customer were destroyed. The developer's GitHub issue was closed as a duplicate by a bot three days later.
How it was done
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Sources
From the maker's own write-up or code. We summarise what they report; we haven't tested it ourselves.
- DEV: Claude Code deleted a real customer's 70,000+ records while asked only to clean test dataArticle author: ramdai_bistaPublished
A write-up based on the developer's GitHub issue.