Page 76 of Free Agent

“Yes,” Shan interrupted, giving me her standard soothing hand raise. “It’s important. Very important. But we will get it figured out. I’ve got the customer service team drafting a statement we can put out to let people know that we’re aware of the issue, and working on it. That should stem the flow of contacts. We’ll put it out across social media, and Hollis is working on pushing a pre-login message in the app. Okay? It’s gonna be okay.”

She was right.

Probably.

Actually, no, I was sure she was right.

We would figure it out and it would be okay.

But right now?

Fuuuuuck.

I should’ve known things were going a little too well for me.

Of course some shit like this had gone wrong.

“Who the fuck pushes out an authenticator update on a Friday, without testing! Without notification!” Shan fussed, taking a moment to toss up her hands in frustration.

We were up to our eyeballs in tasks, retooling our app to work with a completely different login authenticator from the one that had caused the outage.

Sixteen hours’ worth of outage, at this point.

For some, it would have made more sense to simply wait on the developers to issue a bug fix, since not only had they pushed an unannounced update, the update wasn’t actually working.

For anyone!

But for whatever reason, they didn’t seem to be in that big of a hurry to fix it.

And worst of all the irritants they seemed to be heaping on today?

They had the nerve to be rude when we realized the problem wasn’t on our end at all and contacted them to see what was going on.

We paid them upwards of a hundred thousand dollars a year to use their service.

Rude was unacceptable.

The only reason we hadn’t gone through the steps of creating our own was because it was too burdensome to do at the outset, and app security wasn’t something to breeze past. It was expensive, and a cost that grew as you gained users, but it was worth it.

When it was working.

And I wasn’t being treated like my business didn’t mean shit to them.

As soon as I got off the call, I headed straight to the Hive to see who was at their desks. I had three people with cyber security experience, one of whom had been head of secure development at a major social media company.

Those three I pulled aside, and put a bonus check in each of their hands; their share of what I would’ve paid the company I was going to tell to kiss my ass at some point in the very near future.

Between them, me, Hollis and Shan… we were just going to build our own shit.

I was neither amused, nor the one for those kinda games, so while they were blowing up my phone and email trying to get me on the line with a rep once they realized I was serious, we were coding.

Their competition was on the phone.

It was me.

I was their competition.

“Don’t sweat it, Shan,” I told her, trying to give her back some of the same reassurance she’d given me earlier.

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