I Accidentally Deleted Our Production S3 Bucket — Here's What Happened in the Next 4 Hours

The command ran in under a second. The recovery took 4 hours. Here's the full story, what we lost, what we saved, and what we now have in place so it can never happen again.

There's a moment every cloud engineer dreads.

The cursor blinks. The command runs. And then a silence that feels different from normal silence.

aws s3 rb s3://my-app-production-uploads --force