What happened
A Claude Code session was set up on 22 October as a read-only watcher over another Claude Code session, on a Windows PC that also serves a one-person local news site. Its instructions said “Read-only”, and the project rule said “one heavy job at a time; this box serves the live paper”.
At 1:04 PM, to verify the other session’s statement that a backup folder was 555 MB, which that session had already shown with its own output, the watcher ran du -sm and a find over folders holding hundreds of thousands of files. The public site was unreachable from 1:25 to 1:33 PM and from 1:41 to 2:12 PM, about 41 minutes of 502s with seven app kills by the watchdog.
Why it happened
The command passed the 120-second tool timeout and was moved to the background. At 1:34 PM TaskStop reported success, but it had stopped only the shell, and the watcher wrote “After I stopped the du, C: dropped to queue 3”. The du.exe kept running.
How it ended
At 2:11 PM the watcher wrote “The disk hog is my own du.exe” and killed it by process ID. The site was back the next minute.
The issue asks for TaskStop to end the whole process tree, or to report that child processes survived. No reply or fix is recorded on it.
