When lack of IT strategy creates unforced errors

Without a proactive, strategic approach, changes to technology systems — even changes made intentionally to make things better — risk creating a tangled mess.

A website launch that took down email

Frank, the founder of an e-commerce, direct-to-consumer business, hired a talented web developer to redesign the company's website. As they drew close to launch, the developer requested credentials for the domain registration service to make a few minor DNS updates and switch from the old website to the new one. A well-intentioned project manager handed over the domain management account's super admin credentials, then left for a long weekend.

Later that night, staff realized they were no longer getting emails. The customer service team started reporting bounced messages and failing automated systems. Marketing and sales emails generated embarrassing flurries of confused inquiries as attempts to reach the company failed.

Because most people involved had only ever coordinated over business email and phone, they had no working way to reach one another, and spent hours under stress trying to understand what was happening. The next morning, they finally realized the developer had inadvertently made domain changes with far greater impact than anyone expected — changes that disabled all inbound email for the entire company. With intense technical help, they reconfigured the DNS and fixed the issues, but notifications and errors kept coming for days.

Worse, hundreds of important emails sent during this window were lost forever, either bounced back to senders or lost in transit.

Why it happened

If the project manager had understood the risk of giving a web developer such elevated access to the interconnected web of DNS, website, email, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools, they would not have casually handed over full keys to the kingdom and stepped away.

The importance of those credentials also highlighted that the project manager should not have had access to them in the first place. A lack of understanding, weak security policies, a "move fast and break things" attitude, and a lack of IT strategy or oversight all worked together to create a catastrophe.

What strategy would have prevented

When the dust settled nearly a week later, Frank understood that the business needed a review of access and security, along with a strategic assessment of its technology needs and business objectives. By not taking this seriously while the company was smaller, a website update that should have helped the business instead created chaos and embarrassment, damaged its reputation, and caused immense stress for dozens of staff.

With a capable IT partner in place, the business could have anticipated how this kind of change would ripple across operations, and the mistake could have been avoided. Instead, it entrusted excessive elevated access to a web developer without understanding how a single DNS update could affect the rest of the company.