Remebers me of adifferent story from back the day when I worked around a pretty huge SAP system (as some kind of super user whatever). In one, seemingly trivial update (trivial compared to the complete system upgrade from one version to the higher one that worked without problems) cleansed the database including all purchase orders from the last two days company wide. Ah, and the back-up becamo "unusable", too.

But as far as I know, nobody was fired for this. Because, yes, things like this just can happen. An eventually it got fixed anyway.