Deepanshu Kher, a former IT contractor has been sentenced after mass-deleting hundreds Microsoft user accounts belonging to a company he worked for.

According to court documents, in 2017 Deepanshu Kher, who at the time was working for an information technology consulting firm, was hired by the Carlsbad company to assist with its migration to a Microsoft Office 365 (MS O365) environment.

However, the company was dissatisfied with Kher’s work and relayed their dissatisfaction to the consulting firm, which pulled Kher from the Carlsbad’s headquarters and fired him several months later. In June 2018, Kher returned to Delhi, India.

Shortly after his return to India, Kher breached the Carlsbad company’s server and deleted over 1,200 of its 1,500 MS O365 user accounts thus affecting the bulk of the company’s employees and disrupting its operations for two days.

“The employees could not access their email, their contacts lists, their meeting calendars, their documents, corporate directories, video and audio conferences, and Virtual Teams environment necessary for them to perform their jobs. Outside the company, customers, vendors and consumers were unable to reach company employees (and the employees were unable to reach them). No one could inform these buyers what was going on or when the company would be operational again,” according to the US Department of Justice press release.

“Even after those two days, the problems remained. Employees were not receiving meeting invites or cancellations, employees’ contacts lists could not be completely rebuilt, and affected employees could no longer access folders to which they previously had access.”

Kher was arrested on January 11, 2021 upon his arrival to the United States. In addition to the two-year prison sentence, Kher is sentenced to three years’ supervised release and restitution to the company of $567,084, the amount which Carlsbad paid to address issues caused by Kher’s actions.