Micromanaging boss forces employee to shut down server during work hours, ends up regretting it instantly

The best way to show the importance of following rules is to let people face the consequences after ignoring them. That's exactly what happened when an IT employee (u/Illustriousreport482) followed the higher-up's demand, ultimately throwing the entire office into chaos. The story, shared on Reddit on September 27, 2025, has 22K upvotes so far.

The author worked at a mid-sized logistics company where the warehouse was open 24/7, but the office ran only on weekdays (8 AM to 6 PM). "I was responsible for maintaining the internal server that handled everything from payroll to inventory management to shipping labels," the author shared. On a Monday, the employee received an email from a senior, insisting that they take the server offline for scheduled maintenance. The employee read the instructions, scheduled maintenance for Sunday evening, and then sent out emails to inform everyone, and luckily, nobody objected. The senior who had demanded the maintenance didn't read the email and insisted that they must take the server offline immediately.

"I replied, 'Taking the server offline during business hours will temporarily halt access to the shipping system, inventory, time tracking, and payroll processing. Confirm you'd like me to proceed.' She replied (and I quote), 'Yes. You should be working on my schedule. Get it done now,'" the employee recalled.

Consequently, the IT person followed her orders, informed the warehouse manager about it, and shut down the server during working hours. "Within 15 minutes, the office was in chaos. No one could clock in or out, print labels, track shipments, or even check inventory levels. Phones were ringing off the hook. The CFO stormed into my office, asking what the hell was going on. I just showed him the email thread," the employee wrote.

Thirty minutes later, the senior showed up at the IT staff's office red-headed, but they reminded her of the email she had approved. "I offered to restore access early, but reminded her it would take time to reboot and check for errors from the forced shutdown," the author explained.  Subsequently, the senior was called in for a meeting with top executives, and after that, all urgent IT requests had to follow strict approval rules. "I also got a little bonus on my next paycheck for handling the outage with professionalism," they wrote.

Well, the higher-up was at fault, simply because she didn't realize how badly her decision would affect the office productivity. This is something that happens in a lot of companies. In fact, a Society for Human Resource Management survey affirms that 84% of U.S. workers polled said poorly trained managers create a lot of unnecessary work and stress. Moreover, they also found that 50% of employees feel their own performance would improve if their direct supervisor received training in people management. So, now you know how an inefficient person in power can negatively influence the entire office. Meanwhile, reacting to the story, u/angrysquidIsok commented, "The crazy thing is that she needed control so much, but it defied all logical reasons. 'It must be done in my time!' But why, though? That makes no sense. Glad she got what she deserved."

u/arianddu shared, "This reminds me of one place I worked where some manager decided to cut costs by insisting that IT maintenance would be done on a Friday afternoon instead of on Sundays, because if the two required IT staff worked on Sunday, they had to be paid double time, but if they did it on Friday, they would get regular pay. It had to be explained to them TWICE that two people being paid 5 hours at double time was significantly cheaper than paying 180 people to do nothing for 5 hours while the computers were down." u/just-sea3037 wrote, "It always amazes me when uneducated managers don't listen to the experts and thus create sh*tstorms." 

More on Scoop Upworthy

Employees follow outdated company handbook as ordered by boss, severely affecting office productivity

Boss demands worker 'clock out' every time she's not at the desk. 8 hours later, she made him eat his words

Employee follows company's new policy to the T and gives them the taste of their own medicine