The team at the time setup a public Google doc with all the info and a public video stream on YouTube with the devs taking about what to do/what they are doing.
I've never seen anything like that before or after, although I bet lots of prod db get deleted every day:p
https://github.blog/2010-11-15-today-s-outage/
These sloppy setups are common even today, where it's fairly easy to allow for a simple config error or a wrong environment variable (env=PROD) to wipe out production from a test suite. These safeguards need to be in place in the first days of your codebase.
So even if you allow for connection to production (sometimes that's allowed for debugging hard-to-reproduce issues), you want to remove any room for human error.
And your code should obviously NEVER be able to connect to anything other than the local test DB when your environment is set to "TEST".
Or maybe that was another story hehe.
Absolutely. I have at least three stories from friends who witnessed these sort of events first hand, and so many of posts in the genre online affirm that its a regular occurence.
I've yet to hear of a case where there weren't backups for prod, but I'm sure those exist to.
This video goes through the timeline of the main points