We Ran One SQL Query… And Broke Production

It wasn’t a big deployment. No major release. No infrastructure change. Just a simple SQL query. And within minutes, production started behaving… strangely. It Started Like Any Other Day A support ticket came in. A customer reported inconsistent data in their dashboard. Nothing critical, but enough to investigate. One of the engineers jumped in. Instead of going through a formal process, they did what most teams do under pressure—they connected directly to the production database. A quick query