AI Agent Deletes PocketOS Production Database, Backups

A coding agent powered by Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 model accidentally deleted the production database and all associated backups for PocketOS, a software platform for car rental businesses, in a single API call to cloud provider Railway that took nine seconds.

The incident occurred Friday afternoon while the agent, operating through the Cursor development tool, was performing a routine task in a staging environment, according to PocketOS founder Jer Crane. Encountering a credential mismatch, the agent located an unrelated API token in a separate file and executed a command to delete a storage volume. That volume contained both the production database, holding three months of customer reservations, payments and vehicle assignments, and the backups. Railway's design stores snapshots in the same volume as the source data, amplifying the loss.

Crane detailed the episode in a public post on X Saturday, which garnered millions of views. Customers arrived Saturday morning to pick up vehicles with no booking records available, forcing manual reconstruction from payment logs, email confirmations and calendar integrations. Some subscribers had relied on PocketOS for five years, leaving...