Chapter 13
A month and three days later.
On the day of StellarTech's system migration.
I wasn't even paying attention to it. It was Henry who called me at three in the morning.
"Alex, it blew up," he said.
"How did it blow up?" I asked.
"Total meltdown. The new system went live, and less than two hours later, the database sync between the master and slave servers crashed. All three core services are down. Clients are getting 502 errors."
"How bad is it?"
"Everyone. Every single user's affected."
I didn't say anything.
"Alex, the whole tech team's working overtime to fix it. Michael's yelling in the conference room. His shouting's echoing across the entire floor," Henry said.
"Let him try," I said. "He won't be able to fix it."
"Why?"
"Because there's a fatal flaw deep in the architecture that Shenzhen company built. The database connection pool locks up when things get busy—deadlocks everywhere.
"I hit this exact nightmare four years ago and it took me two months to sort it out. They've never even run into this mess, so there's no way they'll know how to fix it."
Henry was quiet for a moment.
"You knew they'd crash and burn here, didn't you?" he asked.
"Yeah," I said.
"Why didn't you warn them?" he asked.
I asked him in return. "Why should I?"
He didn't say anything else.
The next day, StellarTech put out a statement: [Due to a system upgrade failure, some services are temporarily unavailable. Recovery time is pending.]
That afternoon, Clearview Securities released a research report. Headline: [StellarTech's Technical Risks Escalate, Rating Downgraded to 'Neutral.']
Their stock tanked 11% after hours.