Page 75 of Free Agent

Update days usually involved lots of pacing, and I needed to be comfortable for that.

When my phone buzzed again, I put off looking at it immediately, already knowing it was a response from Tatum.

And then when I did…

It’s missing the vitamin P. For pus?—

“Rori!”

My head popped up to see where Shan was standing at my doorway.

Without knocking.

Looking panicked.

Shit.

“What happened?” I asked, putting the phone down to give her my full attention.

She blew out a long breath, shaking her head. “A huge influx of one-star reviews, customer service chats, complaint emails, calls…everybody is booted out of their account. The login system isn’t working.”

“Everybody?” I questioned, and she nodded.

“Everybody. Even us. Even the admin accounts,” she explained. “We’re getting constant timeout errors, and nobody can figure out what’s going on.”

I just looked at her.

Blinked.

Blinked again.

Shit.

Shit.

Shit.

“All this, and y’all waited until just now to tell me?”

“It just happened, like, within a half hour. I didn’t want to trouble you with it while you were on the road trying to get in, and… I thought it was something we’d be able to patch to at least have minimal customer impact. We haven’t been able to figure it out.”

“Shit,” I groaned, feeling a sinking feeling in my stomach. “A half hour, and we’re already using the word influx,” I grunted, standing up. “Fuck!”

“Correct,” Shan said. “We’ve checked all the obvious things.”

“So nobody pushed the update too soon?”

She shook her head. “Only your credentials and mine have the authority to initiate an update,” Shan reminded me. “I can assure you that it wasn’t me, and I have no doubt that it wasn’t you either.”

“Right. Uh… Did a test environment get pushed out?” I questioned, running through everything I could bring to mind.

“As wild as that would be, I did think of that too, and I checked for it already. Nothing changed on our end.”

“So then what the hell?” I groaned, massaging my temples with my palms. “Oh my god. All these stressed out people relying on this app for stuff with their kids… this is going to ruin us.”

“No, absolutely not. We’ll figure it out,” Shan assured. “It’s only been thirty minutes. Well, forty now.”

“Which is probably an eternity to some of these people if they’re trying to keep up with sleep logs, or feeding journals or?—”

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