I really feel sorry for this guy. Accidents happen, which is why development happens in a sandboxed copy of the live system and why back ups are essential. It simple shouldn't be possible (or at least, that easy) for human error to put an entire company in jeopardy.

Take my own company, I've accidentally deleted /dev on development servers (not that major of an issue thanks to udev, but the timing of the mistake was lousy), a co-worker recently dropped a critical table on dev database and we've had other engineers break Solaris by carelessly punching in chmod -R / as root (we've since revised engineers permissions so this is no longer possible). As much as those errors are stupid and as much as engineers of our calibre should know better, it can only takes a minor lack of concentration at the wrong moment to make a major fsck up. Which is doubly scary when you consider how many interruptions the average engineer gets a day.

So I think the real guilt belongs to the entire technical staff as this is a cascade of minor fcsk ups that lead to something catastrophic.