sabotage (n.)
Sabotage is damage done on purpose to stop something working. It is a French word, taken into English early in the twentieth century, from sabot, a wooden shoe or clog.12
The story everybody knows is that workers threw their clogs into the machinery. It is repeated everywhere and recorded nowhere: no account of anyone actually doing it has been produced.2
The likelier route is duller and stays inside the language. French saboter meant to clatter about in wooden shoes, and from there to work clumsily, and from there to botch a job on purpose.12
The clog is in the word either way. Nobody can show that one was ever thrown into a machine.2
The line was shut down by sabotage.