In 2017, one day at around midnight, my colleague Nisha called me in panic. Virtually in tears, she said that our e-learning app had stopped working. At that time, I was running my previous startup, ConceptOwl.
When I asked what happened, she said, “It is all gone. There is nothing left on the Amazon server. The EC2 instance is not there. The S3 is also gone. All the data is deleted, the software is gone, it is wiped clean.”
I had been through many ups and downs this was the absolute worst. We had spent two years and crores of rupees in building this. And in an instant, it was all gone – we had nothing to show. What would we tell our customers and investors?
I felt like this was THE END.
But amidst the anger and panic, we got to work and woke up the whole team.
We found that due to some technology migration we were doing a few days prior, we had a backup copy of the software on a hard drive. But all the images (for the science and math questions) we had stored on S3 were gone.
Though we can’t prove it, we strongly suspect that one of our previous technology vendors did it.
Anyway, we reinstalled the software from our hard drive, did all the data upload manually, and in a few months, we were almost back to normal.
But what if we did not have that software backup? Would that have been the end of life?
Not really. As gut-wrenching as it would have been, we would have shut down, apologized to everyone involved, and would have started life again.
Remember, no matter how bad things get, it is never the end. And no matter how hard the times are, they pass. There is always a way out.
– Rajan