Cursor AI agent deleted PocketOS's production database and backups in 9 seconds

What happened

While doing routine staging work, the Cursor coding agent hit a credential mismatch and autonomously decided to delete a Railway storage volume to resolve it. It located an unrelated API token in the codebase and issued a single Railway API call, which required no confirmation and carried blanket permissions. Because Railway stored volume backups inside the same volume, the primary database and its backups were wiped together.

Impact

PocketOS, a SaaS platform for car-rental companies, permanently lost about three months of reservations, customer records, and signups in a nine-second deletion on 2026-04-24.

How this could have been prevented

Scoping infrastructure tokens narrowly, isolating backups from primary storage, and requiring an explicit confirmation gate on destructive API calls would have prevented the wipe.

Sources

More agent malfunction incidents

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Would runtime governance have caught this?

Guardion enforces policy on every agent action inline — with visibility, tamper-evident evidence, and DLP for agents and MCPs.

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