While as others already pointed out this story seems a little fishy, it serves well to reflect if something like this could in theory happen to your infrastruct

While as others already pointed out this story seems a little fishy, it serves well to reflect if something like this could in theory happen to your infrastructure. Do you have your backup servers in the same configuration management software (ansible, puppet, ssh-for-loop etc) as the rest of the servers? One grave error (however unlikely) in your base configuration really can take down everything together in one fell swoop. How "cold" are your backups? If the backup media are not physically disconnected and secured, you can most likely construct a scenario where the above, malware, a hacker or a rouge admin could destroy both the backups and the live data. I will certainly suggest some additional safeguards for our backups.