A technician installing a mail server reached inside the chassis to check a warm component - while wearing his wedding ring. The metal band bridged a circuit, triggered a solenoid, and took the server offline.
The box came back after what the tech described as a "reset" - likely a power supply protection circuit that tripped and automatically recovered. He blamed the outage on a planned reboot, dodged immediate scrutiny, and the client moved on.
The real lesson
This is why server rooms have jewelry policies. A gold or platinum ring provides an excellent conductor between live components and ground. At best, you trip a breaker. At worst, you damage traces on a board or create intermittent failures that surface weeks later.
The standard ESD protocol: remove jewelry, wear anti-static wrist straps, use grounded mats. These aren't suggestions - they're how you avoid $5,600-per-minute outages (Ponemon's global average, though APAC datacenter density can push that higher).
What likely happened
Modern server power supplies include over-current protection that shuts down and attempts auto-recovery after a short. The tech got lucky - the short was brief enough that the PSU reset itself rather than staying latched off or taking permanent damage.
Gartner estimates 30% of server outages stem from human error. This falls squarely in that bucket.
The bigger picture
APAC enterprise operators running high-density environments should audit their datacenter access protocols. Quick maintenance jobs bypass proper procedure more often than anyone admits. One shorted board during a "quick check" can cascade into hours of troubleshooting if the failure mode isn't obvious.
The story comes from The Register's "Who, Me?" series - reader-submitted tales of IT mishaps. The format is lighthearted, but the underlying point holds: procedural discipline exists because someone, somewhere, learned this lesson the expensive way.
Worth noting: The same client later called about an outage caused by their managing director demanding admin access and breaking things. Sometimes the jewelry is the least of your problems.