I was leading a startup development team in the late 90's and one of our developers told me that some very inappropriate test data had been sent to IBM to be included in a product demo and burned onto tens of thousands of discs that they would distribute.

Eventually it turned out that it was the single word "sheep" - which taken out of the relevant alt.* context was pretty harmless.

Talk about a moment when I thought my career had crashed and burned...

Likewise; they tried to pin it on me, and I had to go to the Git commit history to show it was another employee. My administrative leave was promptly revoked.