After triggering the bug that froze over 500,000 ETH in Parity’s multisig wallets in November 2017, the GitHub user “devops199” appeared in public chats and described what happened in very simple, almost shell‑shocked language.

What they actually wrote

In the Parity / Ethereum community chat right after the incident, devops199 said things along the lines of:

“I’m [an Ethereum] newbie… just learning.”

When a participant replied “You’re famous now lol,” devops199 answered:

“Sorry… I’m really afraid now… can’t talk.”

In later write‑ups and news coverage of the bug, one line became especially infamous as a summary of their action:

“I accidentally killed it.”

This was a paraphrase or short quote used to capture how they had called the contract’s “kill” (self‑destruct) function and thereby bricked the shared library that all those Parity multisig wallets depended on.

Context in simple terms

  • Parity had deployed a library contract for multisig wallets but left it uninitialized, so anyone could become its owner by calling the initialization function.
  • Devops199 discovered this, initialized it (becoming the owner), and then called the kill function, which deleted the library.
  • Once that library was gone, every wallet that relied on it could no longer move funds, effectively freezing hundreds of thousands of ETH.

So, in community memory, what devops199 “wrote after freezing over 500,000 ETH” is remembered as a mix of nervous chat messages (“I’m a newbie… just learning”, “I’m really afraid now… can’t talk”) and the now‑famous line “I accidentally killed it,” which captured the accidental but catastrophic nature of the bug trigger.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.