A colleague pushed a fix to main . Ten minutes later you amended a commit message and ran git push --force . Their commit is no longer reachable from any branch on the server. This is the one Git command that can destroy other people's work as they see it . It is also almost always recoverable, from a place most people do not know exists. Here is the whole thing, reproduced in a disposable repository so you can run it yourself — every command below was run and the output is real. ...