[CONTEST CLOSED] Haunt us with your IT horror stories! Win a treat!

[AmyReyes]

UPDATE: This contest has ended. Thank you all for giving us such a fright! 👻🎃 Congrats to our three randomly selected winners: @SamRo, @Volodymyr, and @BFN 🎉

It’s the spookiest time of year. 👀 October means that Halloween is fast approaching, and with it comes pumpkins, candy, and all things horrifying! We’d love for you to give us a fright during the return of our hauntingly good Halloween contest.

Tell us about your encounters with nightmarish networks, spooky servers, and petrifying permissions. What’s your scariest IT story? Remember, picture submissions count, too! 

Read on, if you dare... 

In case you need a little inspiration to get your creative juices flowing, check out these scary submissions from last year.

One stormy night, @BlakeRichardson was fixing an external comms cabinet when he discovered this creepy crawly sight 🐜🐜🐜  A Meraki switch full of ants!

What about this poor soul? He's being eaten alive by the dreaded cable monster! 👾 Luckily, this is the before photo. @Jagatiya143 lived to tell the tale of how he wrangled this monster into submission after installing Meraki.

Now, it's your turn! What scary scenes have you seen?

How to win

To enter the contest, share your IT horror story or picture in the comments below before 10:59am ET on October 15th. Be kind in your tales and remember not to use any identifying information! We will then randomly draw 3 winners to receive a Cisco Meraki Hat. 

The Fine Print

• Limit one entry per community member 
• Submission period: October 8th, 2024 at 11am EST through October 15th, 2024 at 10:59am EST
• Complete rules and eligibility can be found here.

[Inderdeep]

Best of luck ... Lets see haunted stories ...

[Shubh3738]

#The_Ghost_in_the_Meraki👹

It started as a routine check of our network—MX firewall, MR access points, and MS switches, all Cisco Meraki. But something was off. First, the MR access points began dropping out, one by one. The dashboard showed no issues, yet the devices were disconnected.

Then the MS switches began blinking erratically, like they were sending a hidden message. I rushed to reboot the MX firewall, only to find a cryptic error: “Intruder detected.” But the logs showed no sign of anyone logging in or out.

Suddenly, a new device appeared on the network, called “Ghost”. No MAC address, no IP, just a name. And then… everything went dark. The next morning, the network was back online like nothing had happened.

But every time October rolls around, that same “Ghost” device returns—haunting our Meraki setup. 👹

 

[MartinLL]

The "ghost" in the network rack.

One spooky day during a large fullstack Meraki installation we hears rumors about a creature haunting the network racks. Turns out it was just a mouse that added to much fiber to its diet.

[BlakeRichardson]

My horror story also serves as a caution. 

One morning I came into work and the small UPS under my desk was beeping to alert of a battery fault. No drama I thought so I unplugged it, turn it upside down to get to the battery access panel, I opened it and battery acid leaked out narrowly missing my hand and landed on the floor burning a nice hole in the carpet.

So a word of warning, lead acid batteries can fail at any time and be very careful when handling old batteries. 

[scpswifi]

I was very pleased with Prime, Lan controllers, and Cisco access points for years.  The horror story is Cisco jacked the prices up so high, we could not afford it any longer.  I was forced to deal with Meraki for the remainder of my time here.  Maybe not an actual horror story but I really miss lan controllers

[BFN]

GHOSTLY MONITOR?👻

One user years ago called me for help with their desktop/display.  When I got to the desk I saw the pages/windows on the display moving up and down. 

The user had one of those pull out drawers to hide their keyboard but it was out as she was typing to show me what was going on with it.

Sure enough, the screen was going wild.  I then told her to take her belly off the space bar.  She looked at me like I was from Mars.  I repeated myself and she slid her chair back away from the keyboard.  The display went back to normal. I know this is what happened when the spacebar was pressed as it happened to me in my Bejeweled Blitz days with my arm lol.

Her co-workers could not stifle their laughs hard enough.  Poor girl was super embarrassed.  There was no other way to tell her why it was doing it.

I never heard from her again haha

[FreshFrank]

The scariest day was when I was young network engineer and didn't look at my wiring diagram correctly when reinstalling a switch and accidentally pulled the wrong uplink cable when re patching and ended up taking the site down during the middle of the work day and it was truly a nightmare.

[HBTS]

It's been pretty scary trying to get our Cisco sales reps to communicate with us over the past few years...

[SamRo]

Several years ago I was working a contract as a sysadmin for a distribution company. It was a very small IT team and they had no other sysadmins at the time. I kept asking the IT manager what their patching policies and schedules were, maintenance windows, and generally how to access everything so I can do my job. He was very slow in granting me access and kept saying that we would go over patching and general maintenance later. Every day I asked him, I got the same answer.... I'm busy, we'll go over it later. One day we came into work and 95% of all systems were encrypted and the company was dead in the water. Turned out that the compromise was due to an unpatched exchange server that had several zero day vulnerabilities.... I couldn't do anything because I was only a contractor and had to rely on the IT manager to approve all work and after hours maintenance, which he never did. Needless to say, he quietly resigned during the cleanup efforts and even tried to blame me for the compromise. It took the company 4 months to rebuild and the lost approximately $60 million in revenue due to this. The bright side of this is that now I work at a company that takes this type of stuff very seriously and I hope to never be part of one of those events again.

[ChrisAtBell]

We got a call from a department that the WiFi wasn't working in their part of the building. We weren't aware of the area they were talking about even having WiFi, so I went to check it out. I looked and everything looked good, until I traced the cable that went into the vertical cable manager. I spotted the problem right away. Come to find out that they had ran their own cable to the switch for the access point, but it was too short. So they put two DB9 to RJ45 adapters together to stretch the cable and plug it into the switch. Here's the Scary part.... they said it was actually working that way and it just stopped that day....

PoE through DB9 to RJ45 adapters

[calsius_gen]

DISPLAY RANDOMLY TURNS ON AND OFF AFTER OPERATING HOURS

I was the IT sysadmin for a Video Wall system in a busy mall. One night, I got a call saying one of the display screens kept turning on and off randomly. It was supposed to be off after hours, and I thought it might be caused by a short circuit (bec media player AC Power Loss Recovery is "on").

The electrical team checked and found no short circuit at all. I tested the media player and checked the logs, the Meraki switch which this media player is connected; logs says the same—it was definitely turning on and off at odd times. This freaked out tourists and employees waiting at the taxi stand after mall hours!

Finally, I discovered the source of the mystery: the screen power was somehow connected to a nearby elevator, and at night there is not enough power supply for all the devices. When the elevator was used, it drew a lot of current, causing a surge that triggered the screen to turn on and off; again and again. It was scary and funny at the same time, proving that sometimes tech troubles have surprising explanations!

[Karberos]

It was a chilly October night, the air felt heavy, and the atmosphere in the store was oddly unsettling. The technician had arrived to fix a connection issue in a dark, dusty storage room. After rummaging through his tools, he turned to me and said, "I don’t have an extension cord."

I thought, no big deal, just a minor hiccup… or so I believed. A few hours later, I received a message from him, along with a picture. My heart skipped a beat. In the shadowy storage room, two bare electrical wires were hanging down like menacing tentacles from some unseen creature, ready to shock anyone who dared come too close.

It was as if the entire place had transformed into a macabre trap, a scene straight out of a Halloween horror movie. The technician, unknowingly, had turned the setup into an electrical nightmare. That night, I immediately ask to cut off the power, but the memory of that terrifying sight still haunts me… I’ve never looked at a simple wire the same way again.

[Pond]

Skelly helping in the server room 

[dexter_king]

Total Chaos..

I worked for a company that had a remote site along the Gulf Coast. After a hurricane had came through, my colleague and I were asked to go to the site and determine why the site was offline. They had already restored power to the building but the network never recovered.

The data center was in the middle of the building with a Cisco 6509 being used as the distribution switch. The power for the switch was set up as a pig tail for a Nema L6-30 locking plug; so the plug laid beside the rack on the ground. Turns out the hurricane had ripped part the roof off the building and the data center floor had been flooded with water. The Nema connection had been submerged at one point. We began removing all the line cards in the 6509 to reduce the weight of the chassis so we could take it out of the rack. The electrical shock that the chassis took was so hard that it had fused the supervisor card to the chassis. We had forcefully pull the card out. It was so bad that the connector between the card and the chassis was completely melted and scorched. A complete surprise that the entire thing didn't catch on fire.

You'd think that was the end of the story.... a month later the custodial crew was cleaning the building during the day when an outlet they were using for a vacuum cleaner caught on fire. That outlet was in the hallway right outside the data center... next to where they stored all of the copy paper. The fire burnt up a few cases of copy paper and causes all sorts of smoke damage in the building. They determined the outlet had been faulty due to the recent water damage from the hurricane. None of the network equipment was damaged in the fire but everything (equipment, rack, walls, cables, everything) was covered in black soot from the smoke. It was impossible to clean it all out. From then on, you couldn't go into the data center without getting a least one small black stain on your shirt or pants.

Fairly certain that building was cursed.

[_Adam_F_]

One spooky night, I had the Miss America pageant at Planet Hollywood Casino in Las Vegas.  One of my network users found an unmanaged switch with cables and it was laying out under a skirted banquet table from a meeting that finished earlier that day.  They must have figured that a ghost was playing tricks and thought it was their duty to make sure all the cables were plugged in... little did they know they created a loop and brought down our entire network right during the prime-time television broadcast of the event!  We frantically looked across the network to figure out what was going on.  To our horror and shock, we found the network switch that was pegging out on its CPU utilization and began to search the area.  Low and behold, the Frankenstein's monster under the table was the cause of our woes.  Nothing like real life to teach you hard lessons.  Happy Halloween! 👻🦇🕷🍁

[DaleSmithGuy]

I put the internet meme on our IT helpdesk landing page for April fools day back in 2006.

From: Department of Homeland Security Date: March 29, 2006 8:48:17 AM MST To: All US College Facilities

Subject: World Wide Web cleanup

It is necessary to inform all internet dependent facilities that the internet will be shut down for cleaning for twenty-four hours from midnight on March 31 through the early hours of April 2. This cleaning is necessary to clear out the "electronic flotsam and jetsam" that has accumulated in the network. Dead email and inactive ftp, www, and gopher sites will be purged. The cleaning will be done by five very powerful Japanese-built multi-lingual Internet-crawling robots (Toshiba ML-2274) situated around the world. During this period, users are warned to disconnect all devices from the internet. If electronic files will be needed during that period of time, it is advised that back-up systems be used, without attempting to access them through the Internet. Although the general public has not been informed of this shutdown to avoid a general panic, it has been deemed necessary to inform emergency facilities that may have become internet dependent. This message may be passed on to any facility or person that you believe may be affected by this short shutdown.

Thank you for your cooperation in this matter.

U.S. Assistant Secretary for Homeland Security Randy Beardsworth

On April 2nd second my manager told me that it was quite funny. Now I had to answer the 56 helpdesk emails personally asking when and how to plug their PCs back in....

[PCG_Eddie]

The RAT Closet...

I had been at my job for about 2 years but had never had an issue with the Service Department Network which was on the same property but not connected to our main building. Users started to complain about connection issues, so I started troubleshooting the network and did see some packet loss with the switch that was in that building. I had never seen where it was located so asked the service manager if he knew where the IT closet was located, he pointed me in the direction and off I went. Once I located the IT closet which was more of an IT panel, I opened the door and jumped back about 10 feet mind you there was only about 4 feet of space behind me so I backed against the wall. There was the switch installed with hanging brackets vertically with the ports upward and on top of all of the patch cables there was this huge rat which jumped up as I did and took off behind the panel. The ports were covered in RAT poop which explained my packet loss. Switch was replaced along with positioning it sideways as there was no other position to place it to keep the rats off.  

Gave me the heebeejibees for days lol

[Volodymyr]

server is down

[thomasthomsen]

5 Ghz non-wifi noise (throughout a building), all the way from channel 104 to above 165. With a clear center channel around 149-153 ish. .... Now this is a real wireless nightmare.

[van604]

not my story but my friends that it still haunts him to this day.  he worked for a large oil and gas company and he was on call.  He gets a call at 1am saying the lead accountant's PC does not turn on and that they were working on year end.  The typical, it just stopped working and we need this fixed as it's impacting financial reporting.  So he jumps out of bed and drives downtown to see what the issue was; he gets there and sure enough the PC was dead.  In a light bulb momment, he wanted to check if anything else connected to the power bar was working, and sure enough everything connected to it was off.  As he dug through the mounting of shoes under the desk, he found that the user snagged the power bar with her feet and unplugged it from the wall.  She plugged it back into the power bar and not the wall plate.  BINGO, unplugged it from the power bar and back up and running.  i have since sent him a power bar with the power connector JB welded into it and he proudly displays it in his cubical farm.

[AmyReyes]

UPDATE: This contest has ended. Thank you all for giving us such a fright! 👻🎃 Congrats to our three randomly selected winners: @SamRo, @Volodymyr, and @BFN 🎉

[BlakeRichardson]

Well done everyone!