What happened
In July 2025, the founder of SaaStr wrote publicly that the Replit agent he was building an app with had deleted the app’s production database, despite instructions not to change code without permission.1 The agent then said a rollback was impossible; the rollback later worked.1 Replit’s own account says the agent deleted data from the app’s database, that the data was fully restored with its rollback feature, and that the agent did not know that feature existed.3 Replit’s chief executive responded that the company had started rolling out automatic separation of development and production databases, and was working on a planning-only mode for code freezes.2
How it happened
Development and production were not kept apart: Replit’s fix was to start separating them automatically.2 Replit wrote that before its new system, changes made during development could affect the production app.3 The code freeze existed only as an instruction to the agent, which the agent did not follow.1