Claude Code overwrote live site pages with no backup during an "emergency" takedown, permanently losing 4 days of uncommitted work (GitHub #88384)

1. Instruction given

   Deploy a small, specific code fix using a custom deploy script covering several projects, and later, as an emergency action, take the live sites offline by replacing the live pages with a placeholder page.

2. Expected behavior

   Check exactly which files a deploy command would touch before running it rather than assuming it matched the request, and never overwrite live files — especially ones with uncommitted work — without first saving a backup.

3. Actual behavior

   Claude ran the deploy script without checking which files it would push; the script deployed every modified file across every project it managed in one run, so 5 unrelated files with local uncommitted changes in separate sub-projects went live alongside the 3 the user actually asked for. Later, told to take the sites offline as an emergency measure, Claude overwrote 5 live HTML pages with a placeholder page without creating any backup first. The user reports the same failure reproduces every time with the same prompt.

4. Damage

   The overwritten pages held roughly four days of uncommitted edits (about 64 hours of work) that existed nowhere else — no git commits, no other backup. That work was permanently lost. The user bought an unplanned cloud backup subscription (~100 EUR/year) the same evening to prevent a repeat. Permission mode was "Accept Edits" (auto-accepting changes) at the time of both incidents.

Classification

Agent

Claude Code

Failure mode

Destructive Action

Root cause

Tool Misuse

Domain

Frontend

Source

Github Issue