A reader identified as Phil told The Register's "Who, Me?" column about a Friday afternoon Exchange emergency early in his career. Email was running slowly and messages were stuck, and Phil quickly found the cause: the company's centralized Exchange server had run out of space, mostly because of an overflowing log file directory.
Unsure how to handle such a large system, Phil was relieved when an IT director appeared and told him to delete the log files. Assuming the director knew Exchange administration better than he did, Phil deleted 300GB of logs. The deletion crashed the entire mail system, and because the business ran 24/7 with sites across the country, the outage was a major problem.
Phil spent the weekend learning how to repair and rebuild an Exchange database from the command line, and by Sunday afternoon he had restored service and figured out how to properly truncate logs. He went to work Monday expecting to be fired, but instead the CEO praised his dedication. Phil kept quiet about the director's role in the incident and accepted the praise.
The story is a reminder that log files are not disposable data: deleting them without understanding the consequences can be far more damaging than the full disk they were meant to fix. It also illustrates the risk of following a superior's instructions when the technical details are unclear, especially at the end of the week.