The man who was fired by a machine

Such a clickbait title for a BBC article!

Upon reading the article, it became apparent that Mr Diallo was not fired by a machine.  

Mr Diallo, who was eight months into his three-year contract with the company, did not have his contract renewed by his original manager (who had been laid off) in the company's new IT system.  This kicked off a series of instructions by the IT system to offboard Mr Diallo.

Questionable clickbait title aside, this story had a few interesting points:

1. Why did Mr Diallo's contract had to be renewed in the new system when he was only eight months into his contract?  There should have been a batch job to transfer these data from the old system to the new system and not rely on human intervention.  Furthermore, Mr Diallo was still in his contract, hence the question of his contract having to be 'renewed' should not even come into picture at all.
2. The company was seemingly helpless to reverse the instructions of the IT system.  This seemed odd, because an alternative solution would have been to add Mr Diallo as a new hire, and then reprogramme his card access and computer access.  
3. Mr Diallo found his co-workers distant after his three weeks' absence from the office.  Neither Mr Diallo nor BBC offered an explanation for the co-workers' behaviour, and it was puzzling why this was even brought up.

Most certainly, Mr Diallo was NOT fired by a machine.  Algorithms are programmed by humans, even those with AI.  So it boiled down to whether all bugs in the programme were properly sieved out and resolved, and proper and exhaustive UAT done before the deployment of the system.