An agency accidentally set a lifetime ad budget as the daily spend. By transparently owning the mistake, they discovered the campaign was a huge success. The client was so pleased with the results they happily paid the overage, turning a potential disaster into a relationship-building win.
A UK government office found its unpublished, internal training articles—including Doctor Who fan fiction—were indexed by search engines. A newspaper discovered the content, leading to an absurd PR query about a "moon base invasion." This highlights the critical need to secure non-production web content.
The BBC's attempt to add a location-based personalization feature to its homepage inadvertently broke the site's Content Delivery Network (CDN), taking the entire page offline. This reveals how seemingly minor feature additions can cause catastrophic, cascading failures in complex, large-scale systems.