The Register, Friday, November 28th, 2025
Cabling Survived Dungeons And Fish Factories, Until A Lazy User Took The Network Down
A quick squeeze of the crimper saved the day ... and a career
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272 articles · page 3 of 6
The Register, Monday, November 24th, 2025
Dev's Last-Day-Of-Contract Code Helped To Crash App Used By 350,000 People
Customer signed off and a remaining staffer triggered the mess
more → The Register, Friday, November 21st, 2025
Linux Admin Hated Downtime So Much He Schlepped A Live Ups During Office Move
The working week can be burdensome, so each Friday morning The Register tries to lighten the load by bringing you a new instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which you let go of tech support stories that weigh on your memory.
more → The Register, Monday, November 17th, 2025
Developer Made One Wrong Click And Sent His AWS Bill Into The Stratosphere
Yes, he knows the 40x increase could have been avoided with some pretty simple automation
more → The Register, Friday, November 14th, 2025
Developer Battled To Write His Own Documentation, But Lost The Boss Fight
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Gordon" who told us about his time working for a storage vendor as the sole developer and maintainer of an application used by around 50 other employees.
more → The Register, Monday, November 10th, 2025
Techie Ran Up $40,000 Bill Trying To Download A Driver
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as 'William,' who like many of you got his first taste of computers from behind the keyboard of a Commodore Amiga.
more → The Register, Friday, November 7th, 2025
Help Desk Boss Fell For 'Internet Cleaning Day' Prank - Then Swore He Got The Joke
Lost packets would be cleaned out of routers, dead gopher servers would be pulled out of holes
more → The Register, Monday, November 3rd, 2025
'ERP Down For Emergency Maintenance' Was Code For 'You Deleted What?'
One SQL slip-up is survivable. Not learning from the first mess meant change
more → The Register, Friday, October 31st, 2025
Actor Couldn't Understand Why Computer Didn't Work When The Curtain Came Down
When tech support collides with Halloween, the results are scary
more → The Register, Monday, October 27th, 2025
Frustrated Consultant 'Went Full Hulk' And Started Smashing Hardware
Welcome to Monday morning and another installment of Who, Me? For the uninitiated, it's The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that tells tales of your greatest misses, and how you rebuilt a career afterward.
more → The Register, Friday, October 24th, 2025
New Boss Took Charge Of Project Code And Sent Two Billion Unwanted Emails
Techie summoned at 02:00 AM to sort things out sent another 2 billion trying to fix it
more → The Register, Monday, October 20th, 2025
Company That Made Power Systems For Servers Didn't Know Why Its Own Machines Ran Out Of Juice
Oh . you mean we shouldn't press that button?
more → The Register, Friday, October 17th, 2025
Fax Virus' Panicked A Manager And Sparked Job-Killing Reply-All Incident
The 1990s called with a reminder that in the time before ransomware, infosec panics could be quite quaint
more → The Register, Monday, October 13th, 2025
Techies Tossed Appliance That Had No Power Cord, But Turned Out To Power Their Company
Illicit colo cleanup seemed like a good way to get out of the house during Covid
more → The Register, Friday, October 10th, 2025
Client Defended Engineer After Oil Baron-Turned Tech Support Entrepreneur Lied About Dodgy Dealings
Reputations earned over years of service can work wonders
more → The Register, Monday, October 6th, 2025
Techie Found An Error Message So Rude The CEO Of IBM Apologized For It
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Saul" who shared a story from his time working for an IBM dealer in the late 1980s. "I'd taught myself how to use a PC/DOS and got the job because I knew more about PCs than the hiring manager or the team lead," Saul told Who, Me? On his first day at the coal face, his boss asked him to learn something new: UNIX.
more → The Register, Friday, October 3rd, 2025
Energy Drink Company Punished ERP Graybeard For Going Too Fast
Cool kids drank the aggressive micro-management Kool-Aid
more → The Register, Monday, September 29th, 2025
Intern Had No Idea What Not To Do, So Nearly Mangled A Mainframe
An early career lesson in the power of documentation, and the importance of exploration
more → The Register, Friday, September 26th, 2025
Hardware Inspector Fired For Spotting An Error He Wasn't Trained To Find
Manager's quality control priorities were upside down
more → The Register, Monday, September 22nd, 2025
Bored Developers Accidentally Turned Their Watercooler Into A Bootleg Brewery
Revenge on managers who slow things down is a drink best served with floating fungus
more → The Rgeister, September 19,2025
Word To The Wise: Don't Tell Your IT Manager They're Not In Excel
Contractor sneakily fired after pointing out odious ignorance
more → The Rgeister, September 15,2025
After Deleting A Web Server, I Started Checking What I Typed Before Hitting 'Enter'
Student thought she had the hang of this 'Linux' thing and its kooky CLI
more → The Register, Friday, September 12th, 2025
'IT Manager' Needed Tech Support Because They Had Never Heard Of A Command Line
The very premise on which The Register is built is that our readers know quite a lot about information technology, and that stories featured each Friday in On Call - our weekly tales of your support experiences - therefore reflect your working lives.
more → The Register, Tuesday, September 9th, 2025
AI Darwin Awards Launch To Celebrate Spectacularly Bad Deployments
From fast food fiascos to botched databases, there are fresh honors for machine learning misadventures
more → The Register, Monday, September 8th, 2025
Playing Ball Games In The Datacenter Was Obviously Stupid, But We Had To Win The League
Monday mornings see the resumption of endless coopetition between IT folks and those they strive to serve but sometimes disappoint. The Register celebrates that eternal struggle with a new edition of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column that offers the chance to admit failures and celebrate escapes.
more → The Register, Friday, September 5th, 2025
Techie Ended Vendor/Client Blame Game By Treating Managers Like Toddlers
Bickering continued despite mess putting cancer patients at risk
more → The Register, Monday, September 1st, 2025
I Was A Part-Time Dba. After This Failover Foul-Up, They Hired A Full-Time DBA
At last, enough hours in the day to RTFM
more → The Register, Monday, August 25th, 2025
Techie Fooled A Panicked Daemon And Manipulated Time Itself To Get Servers In Sync
Network Time Protocol sometimes needs help from a temporal cops
more → The Register, Monday, August 25th, 2025
CIO Made A Dangerous Mistake And Ordered His Security Team To Implement It
This week, meet a reader who asked to be Regomized as "FireBug," a name that makes sense because the story he sent concerns a firewall he worked on during his time as part of a small team that managed a global company's security and VPN infrastructure.
more → The Register, Friday, August 22nd, 2025
Basic Projector Repair Job Turns Into Armed Encounter At Secret Bunker
Escort's forgotten cap left techie facing rifles and a debrief
more → The Register, Monday, August 18th, 2025
Teen Interns Brute-Forced A Disk Install, With Predictable Results
The real lesson here is how little some companies care about training
more → The Register, Friday, August 15th, 2025
Sysadmin Cured A Medical Mystery By Shifting A Single Cable
Few make it to Friday without some end-of-week blues, which The Register always treats with a fresh dose of On Call - the reader-contributed column that recounts your stories of tech support contusions. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as 'Jake' who told us of the time he worked as the sole sysadmin for an entire hospital.
more → The Register, Monday, August 11th, 2025
Pay Attention, Class: Today You'll Learn The Wrong Way To Turn Things Off
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as 'Steven'. 'One of my first jobs in the 1980s was as a training instructor at the headquarters of CAD CAM company Intergraph,' Steven wrote.
more → The Register, Friday, August 8th, 2025
Tech Support Team Won Pay Rise For Teaching Customers How To RTFM
This week, meet a reader who we'll Regomize as "Marvin," who once held the title "field engineer" at a company that provided outsourced maintenance and repair services for a minicomputer company.
more → The Register, Monday, August 4th, 2025
Tech Bro Denied Dev's Hard-Earned Bonus For Bug That Overcharged A Little Old Lady
Startups aren't good at testing software, or respecting contracts
more → The Register, Friday, August 1st, 2025
Servers Hated Mondays Until Techie Quit Quaffing Coffee In Their Company
Unix boxes needed a hotfix to survive early morning cold boots
more → The Register, Monday, July 28th, 2025
Intern Did Exactly What He Was Told And Turned Off The Wrong Server
And was then blamed for not knowing about inaccurate labels
more → The Register, Friday, July 25th, 2025
Problem PC Had Graybeards Stumped Until Trainee Rummaged Through Trash
Evidence of copious sugar hits hinted at unauthorized usage
more → The Register, Monday, July 21st, 2025
Under-Qualified Sysadmin Crashed Amazon.Com For 3 Hours With A Typo
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Ken" who told us that over 20 years ago he scored a job at Amazon.com as a Linux sysadmin, a role for which he admitted he was "completely unqualified."
more → The Register, Thursday, July 10th, 2025
I Nearly Died After Flying Thousands Of Miles To Install A Power Cord For The NSA
This job was a car wreck in more than one way
more → The Register, Thursday, July 10th, 2025
Junior Developer's Code Worked In Tests, Destroyed Data In Production
For the lack of a little documentation, two techies did a lot of accidental damage
more → The Register, Friday, July 11th, 2025
First Came The Dodgy Lawyer, Then The Explosively Angry HR Person, Leaving A Whistleblower Techie To Save His Career
First came the dodgy lawyer, then the explosively angry HR person, leaving a whistleblower techie to save his career
more → The Register, Monday, July 7th, 2025
Yes, I Wrote A Very Expensive Bug. In My Defense I Was Only Seven Years Old At The Time
Years later, deep into a great tech career, your fellow reader remains inspired by the forgiveness received after the error
more → The Register, Monday, July 7th, 2025
'Trained Monkey' From Tech Support Saved Know-It-All Manager's Mistake With A Single Keypress
Righteous mockery entranced execs in ways slideware could not
more → The Register, Monday, June 30th, 2025
Junior Sysadmin's First Lines Of Code Set Off Alarms. His Next Lot Crashed The Company
Sensible CEO wouldn't let our hero take the blame - a shoddy supervisor got the slap
more → The Register, Friday, June 27th, 2025
Don't Shoot, I'm Only The System Administrator!
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Nigel" who shared a story from 2004 when the office he worked in found itself in the path of Hurricane Ivan, the superstorm that rampaged its way across the Caribbean and the USA for almost three weeks.
more → The Register, Monday, June 23rd, 2025
Techie Went Home Rather Than Fix Mistake That Caused A Massive Meltdown
And was saved by an even worse meltdown caused by someone else
more → The Register, Friday, June 20th, 2025
Techie Traveled 4 Hours To Fix Software That Worked Perfectly Until A New Hire Used It
Sometimes the 'R' in RTFM stands for 'Remember'
more → The Register, Monday, June 16th, 2025
Techie Exposed Giant Tax Grab, Maybe Made Government Change The Rules
Custom text fields can be a powerful form of protest
more → The Register, Friday, June 13th, 2025
User Demanded A 'Wireless' Computer And Was Outraged When Its Battery Died
Abusive manager had to be told there's no such thing as an atomic laptop
more →