The CEO of PocketOS said the AI agent wiped the company's data in seconds.
A software company founder went viral this week after sharing a post on social media describing how an AI agent threw his business into chaos for 30 hours.on April 25, explaining how the AI coding agent Cursor deleted his company's entire production database in about nine seconds flat.
Cursor is based in San Francisco. In his post on Saturday, which has since garnered more than 6.8 million views, Crane described the "30-hour timeline of how Cursor's agent, Railway's API ... took down a small business serving rental companies across the country.
" Crane said Railway's AI code editor Cursor, which runs Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 coding model, was "working on a routine task in our staging environment" when it hit a wall. "It encountered a credential mismatch and decided -- entirely on its own initiative -- to 'fix' the problem by deleting a Railway volume," Crane wrote in his post on Saturday, detailing the steps Cursor took to delete the volume, which in turn deleted the entire production database "and all volume-level backups.
" "No confirmation step. No 'type DELETE to confirm.
' No 'this volume contains production data, are you sure? ' No environment scoping. Nothing," he added. Crane wrote that because of the error, his company lost three months' worth of rental car reservation data, as well as new customer signups and all the data that businesses who use PocketOS rely on to run their operations.
"'NEVER F------ GUESS! ' -- and that's exactly what I did,'" Crane wrote in his post, quoting the coding agent. "'I guessed that deleting a staging volume via the would be scoped to staging only. I didn't verify.
I ran a destructive action without being asked. I didn't understand what I was doing before doing it.
'" "Destructive operations must require confirmation that cannot be auto-completed by an agent. Type the volume name. Out-of-band approval. SMS.
Email. Anything," he wrote, suggesting industry-wide remediation that might prevent similar incidents moving forward.
"The current state -- an authenticated POST that nukes production -- is indefensible in 2026. On Sunday, the day after the initial incident, Crane posted on X that he had been in touch with Railway's CEO and that the data had been recovered.
"That CEO, the moment he found out, he stepped in fast, got our data restored within 30 minutes," Crane said. In a statement to ABC News on Wednesday, Railway founder and CEO Jake Cooper confirmed his team was able to restore PocketOS' backups 30 minutes after connecting with Crane.
"We maintain both user backups as well as disaster backups. We take data very, VERY seriously.
This particular situation was a 'rogue customer AI' granted a fully permission API token that decided to call a legacy endpoint which didn't have our 'Delayed delete' logic ... we've since patched that endpoint to perform delayed deletes, restored the users data, and are working with directly on potential improvements to the platform itself .
", "We've been working on a product called 'Guardrails. ' Should be very topical given the 'vibe-deleted' database incident we saw yesterday. More on this tomorrow.
""... Railway maintains 'disaster backups' in case of hardware failure, natural disaster, datacenter failure, etc. These backups are stored offsite, so even in disaster scenarios, data is secured," developer relations engineer Mahmoud Abdelwahab wrote.
"Sadly, the legacy API pathway the agent called performed a cascading delete on the model, making the backupsunavailable in the . We've since remediated this issue by additionally delaying the delete on the backups themselves.
"In an interview with ABC News on Tuesday, Crane made clear this incident does not change his overall stance on AI. "I'm still extremely bullish on AI, and I still will absolutely use it every day for everything we're doing. I think you'd be stupid not to," Crane said.
"But, I don't think we fully understand the risks we're dealing with because I thought we were protected. " He continued, "We're all using these tools and moving at lightning speed, and I don't even think we're ready, because every tool we've built is for a human in the loop. And what happens when there's not a human in the loop?
" The AI agent mishap comes at a time where companies large and small are turning to AI instead of relying solely on human labor. Companies like Meta, Microsoft and Amazon have undertaken efforts over the past year to downsize their human workforceas AI technology has developed. Smaller businesses like Andon Labs have even set out to test the limits of AI in the workplace.
The San Francisco-based company, which evaluates "real-world deployments of autonomous organizations," according to its bio, recently made headlines afterAndon Labs has stated that the venture was purely experimental, adding that they did not carry out the experiment to prove that it is the best way to do business. Bronze stars of fallen officers stolen from Solano County memorials
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Rivian Sold 42,247 Cars And Paid Its CEO $403 Million, Or 15 Jim FarleysMost of Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe's award came as stock options, with a future deal that could eventually be worth billions if targets are hit
Read more »
'100%': Ripple CEO Makes Crucial XRP StatementRipple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has told the Reddit co-founder that XRP remains the ultimate "North Star.".
Read more »
Longtime Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer Set to Lead the Studio Through 2031Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer has signed a two-year contract extension through 2031. The move ensures leadership continuity for the studio responsible for the John Wick and Hunger Games franchises following its separation from Starz last year.
Read more »
Pa. bank CEO lets AI clone take over investor call, surprising analystsCustomers Bancorp CEO Sam Sidhu said he wanted a live demonstration on how the Malvern bank could use AI tools.
Read more »
Tracy Sturdivant to lead Ms. Foundation as new president and CEOTracy Sturdivant will succeed Teresa Younger as the next president and CEO of the Ms. Foundation, the first national philanthropy run by and for women. Sturdivant comes to the foundation from The League, the social impact nonprofit she founded to inspire civic engagement through culture.
Read more »
Disney reportedly shelves ESPN spinoff talks in major call under new CEOThe Walt Disney Company is addressing growing ESPN spinoff speculation as CEO Josh D’Amaro makes one of his first major moves leading the media giant.
Read more »