It might be a stunt, but stuff like that happens. Many years ago I used to work for a large European company that ran a booking system for several hundreds of airlines. The system was used as a back-end by more than one famous online booking site. Currency rates were updated automatically. Once, on a new year's eve, at midnight, a glitch slipped into the Canadian dollar conversion rate, setting 1 CAD to 0 EUR. All of…
I always wonder why systems like this so rarely do even basic plausibility checks before data is updated.
Unfortunately we'd sometimes get partial or corrupted feeds. Partial feeds triggered investigation and possibly a manual rerun and corrupted ones often halted the system.
Because we only used monthly numbers for reporting, delaying and rerunning any other day was pointless beyond standard root cause analysis to prevent recurrence. And this system had hundreds of feeds so at first there were almost daily issues.
So I added a check to throw out any deviations over two sigma from the median of the last 30 days' good feeds which knocked out 99% of our data quality issues. I got in a boatload of trouble for different reasons but that's another story.