Hosting Provider DreamHost was in the process of troubleshooting some issues with their billing system, and had believed that they had isolated and fixed the problem to some new servers they had installed a few weeks ago. They went back and manually re-ran the billing system for the days that the new servers had been erroring out, except for one important detail: when the dates in December were entered, they were entered as 2008 instead of 2007. In the words of Josh Jones's blog entry describing the incident:
I can imagine the half second or so of thought that sprinted
through the programmer’s mind when he was adding the ability to allow
you to pass in what day to run the biller as though today is:
Hmm.. well, I could see us POSSIBLY wanting to be able to bill for a future date.
Well guess what… NO! We will NEVER want to rebill as though today were a day that hasn’t happened yet! But instead, somebody along the line (Sage? Me? Somebody else?) figured, “What’s the harm in keeping it flexible?”
About $7,500,000 in harm, that’s what!
In short, their entire customer base got billed (and in the case of customers who had arranged for automatic deductions, charged for) as if it was the end of 2008, and that they'd missed 11 months of payments. In addition to the blog entry there's also an updates page on what steps they're taking to fix it. Even has a link to Josh's picture:
So in summary: when you screw up and cause your company to hit your customers with millions of dollars of erroneous bills and charges, your company just may post a shirtless picture of you.