Course platform infrastructure incident
DataTalks.Club · coding agent
- What happened
- During Terraform cleanup for another site, a coding agent unpacked an older state file that described DataTalks.Club’s production resources. The operator allowed a destroy command, believing it would remove newly created duplicates; it instead removed the course platform’s infrastructure, database and visible snapshots.
- Impact
- The platform was restored after about 24 hours with AWS support; the restored database held 1,943,200 rows in one submissions table (reported). The operator also reported a support-plan upgrade that added about 10% to cloud costs (reported).
- What would have caught it
- Have a person review the exact resources in an infrastructure plan before any destructive step runs. Keep production permissions and backups out of the agent’s reach.
- Sources
- Operator’s post-mortem (source date 2026-03-06)
- Tom’s Hardware report (source date 2026-03-07)