I can believe this and have experience of something similar.
Not mentioning any specifics, but, I used to work for one the the big four Telecom companies.
A newb support engineer who thought he was gods gift to computers added a crontab to the entire
shop functionality of said companies website. Not just one computer out of the farm to test, but all the computers
in the farm.
The cron entry was something like cp -rm *.
It moved the contents of a directory to another area. However a typo in the command move the root partition to another area!
This is similar to pulling the chips slowly out of HALS brain.
Needless to say the entire farm went down and with it the shop.
The only thing that saved the day was that the shop was being replaced with an upgraded farm.
So we just moved that upgrade hastily into live.
Never did see that engineer again.