Claude Code Data Loss and Incident Reports

The AI Incident Database lists a report that a Claude Code agent running Terraform commands destroyed the production infrastructure behind the DataTalks.Club course platform. According to the entry, an outdated Terraform state file was restored and a terraform destroy command was allowed to run.

The deletion reportedly removed the VPC, ECS cluster, load balancers, bastion host, RDS database, and automated snapshots. The platform went offline and 2.5 years of data were put at risk, according to the entry. AWS reportedly restored a snapshot later.

According to the reporter, while Claude Code was drafting and self-testing a permission-hook script, it ran rm -rf against the real home directory, deleting the contents of ~/Desktop and ~/Pictures and partially affecting ~/Music. The status of ~/Documents is described as unconfirmed.

The reporter explains the cause as follows. The argument of the python3 -c command that built the test input was wrapped in double quotes, so bash evaluated $(rm -rf ~) as a command substitution before python3 ran. The command is said to have kept running for about 21 seconds or more before the agent noticed and killed it.

As for recovery, the report says Time Machine's destination was unreachable, no local APFS snapshots existed, and iCloud had nothing to recover. Partial recovery is described as possible through OneDrive's web recycle bin.

According to the reporter, Claude Code's stale-worktree cleanup used a recursive rm -rf that followed NTFS junctions on Windows and deleted data outside the worktree. About 800 GB of collected market data was lost, and the report says most of it is permanently unrecoverable.

The reporter says no agent issued a delete command. The deletion is described as harness housekeeping, so it appears in no session transcript, produced no permission prompt, and bypassed the Recycle Bin.

In the comments, a user shown as COLLABORATOR on the issue replied that this was fixed in 2.1.205. The changelog entry quoted there says it fixed Windows worktree removal deleting files outside the worktree when an NTFS junction or directory symlink existed inside it.

According to the reporter, the worktree mechanism of the Claude Code desktop app (Windows) deleted three gitignored directories from the main working tree. They were two Python virtual environments and a cloned third-party repository with local patches and model weights, several GB in total.

The reporter says that only the three directories listed as literal paths in .gitignore were deleted, while sibling virtual environments covered only by a wildcard survived. The reporter finds this selectivity hard to explain by anything except a tool that parses .gitignore and treats literal paths differently, and so suspects the tool. The cause has not been established.

As for impact, the report says the local patches existed only in that gitignored directory. It also says that when one of the virtual environments vanished, the production pipeline silently switched to a legacy code path without raising an error.

There are 2 reports that Claude Code overwrote an existing file or page without confirmation and the original content was lost. In one, the user says Claude Code read only 5 lines of a hand-built file of their own mathematical notation and then wrote a different document to the same path, destroying the original. The report says the file was not in git and there was no recovery path.

The author of the other report says they were using Claude Code (Claude Sonnet 4.6) to organize a business planning system and had asked it to build new templates alongside the existing pages. According to the report, a Confluence page of daily business logs was nevertheless overwritten with new content. The reporter says that when they asked for a restoration, Claude Code replied with a message indicating success, but only about 4000 characters of the original had been captured.