Eh, I'm inclined to agree with you that the ex admin isn't "right" but the essence of my statement is that he may have been carrying out what was his optimal strategy.

If you treat people bad, they'll treat you bad. If you nuke Russia, Russia will nuke you. It's the Nash Equillibrium where each party is faced with a game and certain situations call for your best move. But your best move should account for what I'll do, and that should be factored into your initial move.

Mutually assured destruction is actually a powerful deterrent. Do we know what the ex-admin's situation was prior to all this? Only then should we pass judgement.

Morally, I'd say the ex-employee doesn't have a leg to stand on. If the employee had been wronged and their actions only negatively impacted the employer, then I'd be sympathetic, but all of Verelox's customers have been damaged, some of them perhaps irreparably, by this. Getting back at your employer with such huge amounts of collateral damage is never acceptable.

I find it hugely improbably that ex-admin's situation entailed being wronged by all of the customers whom he impacted by this action.

You are basically justifying the 'killing of innocents' here..

If we assume that the firm did awful things to the employee, we can't also consider those who employed the firm to do those awful things "innocent".

What if the customers' data was preserved, archived, and sent to them as links? And just the VPS was trashed? Now, we're talking a brief disruption instead of total loss which the customers indirectly signed up for by going with a cheap, small player instead of one qualified to provide higher availability and security.

The collateral damage would low to non-existent for the users depending on how critical the service was. The direct damage would be to the employer. If the employer was the bad guy (hypothetically), would you still state there's no context or any situation whatsoever where the employee should cause them damage?

Pedantry.

If their employer was a James Bond level super-villain about to shortly kill millions you could construct this scenario.

Otherwise there is no scenario where inflicting what you term a "brief disruption" (but what they'd likely describe as an awful, painful and expensive) to thousands of innocent customers is justified. Customer costs could easily be millions, if 1,000 customers each spend over ten hours of worker time dealing with that disruption.

If the employer did something illegal, report them to the authorities. If they wronged you, other employees, or customers, take them to court and publicize their malfeasance.

If you can't do any of those things because what the company did wasn't wrong or illegal, and instead wipe their servers, you are a sad little loser who can't handle the fact that they just didn't like you, and for good reason.

Man, your comment is so far off base and patronizing, that I think you're the sad loser here.

The ex-admin in question probably understood the impending customer harm. But the customers are the veins of a company- without them, they're not a company at all. The ex-admin just played dirty- something that he thought was the only way to win a lopsided battle against a force much greater than he.

In David V Goliath, Goliath was taken down... with a slingshot. A weapon. And he's celebrated as someone over coming a stacked challenge. The customers were the ex-admins slingshot. The difference is that the law doesn't allow this behavior

"Otherwise there is no scenario where inflicting what you term a "brief disruption" (but what they'd likely describe as an awful, painful and expensive) to thousands of innocent customers is justified. Customer costs could easily be millions, if 1,000 customers each spend over ten hours of worker time dealing with that disruption."

That same logic would make it unjustified for them to be using such a small, unproven service to begin with. I mean, the first thing I do for mission-critical stuff is to see if the hardware, software, or service has supported long periods of uptime with easy maintenance and security patches. Also, has anything really bad like preventable breaches happened? And how are the servers configured by default?

Further, if you're worried about downtime so much, you have two providers in a setup with replication plus failover. The only people responsible for service going down and data destroyed completely in a world where basic HA is cheap are the customers. They should assume some shit could happen. They should mitigate it if it matters. Those that didn't took the risk willingly. Backups in particular are also really cheap these days.

"If the employer did something illegal, report them to the authorities. "

People have reported all kinds of big companies to the authorities for breaking the law. Goldman Sachs nearly destroyed the financial system. They got criminal immunity + $1 trillion from the government whose Treasury was run by their ex-CEO who profited off that activity. They and most of the rest like them still in business mostly without anyone doing time on the top. What's your next move for punishment if law doesn't care or is receiving bribes (esp Congress)?

"If you can't do any of those things because what the company did wasn't wrong or illegal"

Wrong and illegal are two different things. Slavery was legal but wrong. Locking child workers in buildings that might catch fire to force overtime was horribly wrong but legal. Civil forfeiture... taking an innocent person's money or property w/out charges... is wrong but legal. All kinds of abuse of employees, esp regarding promotions or references, is harmful to all but people on top and legal.

You're clear that no illegal action should be taken in response to a wrong. I'm guessing you oppose the underground railroads that freed slaves since they were illegal. You would have griped about it at best while all the harm continued to those people if working within the legal framework.