First observation: sh!t happens! That is a proven, reliable fact and an environment which can't cope with that is designed wrongly from the start. If you need a service to be not disrupted you shouldn't allow people to develop on it, because development will create the one or other hiccup to happen over time. Further, you need to take precautions against failure of every single part of the system if it should survive. Suppose instead of your error some hardware would have crashed, the network disrupted, whatever. This is what HA-solutions are for, for instance.

No SysAdmin in his right mind will let a manager determined to "save" on hardware off this hook: do you want to bet the projects future on me never doing an accidental typo? (As it is i have actually said exactly this in a design conference - and got my testing system.) And, by the way: when they decide about new office furniture for their offices any intention to save is usually abandoned immediately, so wtf?

Second aspect: whenever you do something it is your utmost responsibility to test what you have done. Immediately! So how can you create such a loop and not notice it? How can you implement this change even twice? This is not a question of introducing an error - that happens to all of us. It is a matter if noticing you have done something wrong and this has to do with the style of work: if i delete a file, i do an immediate "ls" to verify it (and it alone) is gone, if i do a "cd" i do a "pwd" to verify i am in the right directory, etc., etc.. This slows me down by perhaps 5%, but when i think i have something done i usually have it done - without any error. The 5% are easily recovered not having to do the error correction and/or recovery others eventually have to do.

So, i hope for your best, but you should really change your work ethics and learn from this accident. My 2 cents.

bakunin