Cisco Systems Inc. has admitted to losing some of its customers’ Meraki Cloud data late last week following a configuration error.

“On August 3rd, 2017, our engineering team made a configuration change that applied an erroneous policy to our North American object storage service and caused certain data uploaded prior to 11:20AM Pacific time on August 3 to be deleted,” the company said in an update Friday. Cisco Meraki is a subsidiary of Cisco’s that specializes in cloud-managed information technologies such as wireless, switching, security, enterprise mobility management, communications and security cameras.

Cisco also said its engineers were working flat-out over the weekend to see if they could recover any of their customer’s data, and will provide tools that “help our customers specifically identify what has been lost from their organization.” It also promised an update by the end of Monday “with the current status of what resources we will be making available to help restore functionality.”

Some users may already know the impact on their own organizations as Cisco has already identified “Enterprise Apps” as one of the areas that was impacted, which is hardly likely to go unnoticed. Interactive voice response menus have also gone missing, something that customers are also likely to notice pretty quickly.

The incident is an embarrassment for Cisco, which markets its Meraki cloud service as a solution for automating networks and voice systems. The fact that it made such a glaring error and didn’t have systems in place to recover the lost data doesn’t cast the company in the most positive light.

Still, perhaps Cisco can take some comfort from the fact it’s not the only cloud company to have had its engineers mess up customer data. Back in February, Amazon Web Services’ engineers made an error that led to its S3 service going offline for several hours. In 2016, Google’s cloud teams patched the wrong routers, causing a major outage there too.

Incidents such as this provide good ammunition for those who advocate keeping data on premises or using managed services in order to know exactly what’s going on, rather than blindly trusting cloud providers to keep everything ticking.

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