The Burndown - Part 1

 

Disclaimer: This story is purely fictional and does not include any conspiracy theories.

PART I

Just In: Jomato makes its stock market debut amassing a huge IPO to its name. The future is bright for such tech-driven start-ups as Jomato becomes the first Indian unicorn to go public.

There were celebrations at every Jomato office. They have come a long way from a food delivery start-up. The celebrations were, however short-lived. Reports of the app not working hit the Internet. Upon investigation, it was revealed that they were not alone, several apps were hit too due to a bug in their DNS Service provider – Akimi that eventually led to a global internet outage. The CEOs of the affected companies tweeted that their respective apps will begin functioning after Akimi rolls out a fix. The situation elapsed in 30 mins and all was back to normal, at least that was what it seemed.

Rick, customer support at Jomato was busy answering customer queries. It was a normal Saturday evening and his shift has just started. After finishing his first customer call, he put his headphones aside and went to grab a cup of coffee. He returned shortly with a coffee cup, glanced at his monitor and sighed. There were plenty of support requests. He took a sip of coffee and sat down. Putting his cup aside, he started assigning the requests to his teammates.

He then noticed something strange in the customer support requests and their frequency. He got up from his chair, pushed it aside and dashed to his manager Mahesh’s room. He didn’t bother to knock as he intruded into Mahesh’s room interrupting a client meeting that was going on.

“We have an emergency sir and you must see it!” Rick said panting. Mahesh was clearly not in the mood.

“I am in the middle of a meeting, this better be important” He called off the meeting and shut down his laptop.

“Our app seems to have developed another bug… The customers… they are furious” Rick stuttered.

“What? That’s impossible.”

“You have to come and see it for yourself sir,” Rick took Mahesh to his workstation. Rick read out some of the customer support requests for Mahesh.

“At first, I thought it was a fake request but then I kept receiving similar requests from people all across India.” Rick clarified. Mahesh took control of the workstation from Rick and looked into the requests. He seemed dumbfounded.

“Sir, users have been tweeting about this issue. There are so many” Rick handed over his mobile phone to Mahesh. Mahesh scrolled through the tweets.

“I guess the upper management will be aware of this issue by now, hope they will regain control of the situation soon. You and your team better get to answering these requests.” Mahesh patted Rick and was on his way back to his room.

“This is atrocious, we might have to shut down our services for a while”

“How could this have happened?”

“Nobody knows how this happened, the developers are working on a fix right now”

“This bug could cost us millions!”

“What if it wasn’t a bug?”

“Are we speaking of a potential ‘You are hacked’ scenario?”

“I could be sure of one thing man – we’re screwed!”

Mahesh overheard the gossips and the conspiracy theories. He couldn’t stop thinking about the magnitude of the issue.

Jomato HQ, Haryana, India:

Deepinder Gopal, the Jomato CEO calls for an emergency board meeting.

Silence wrapped the conference room. The board members were in their seats waiting for someone to start. The projector shone on the whiteboard displaying Jomato’s logo in the centre of the board. Deepinder stood up from his seat, took the AC remote and lowered the temperature in the room. They were all feeling the heat both inside and outside the company. Deepinder cleared this throat.

“We are here to discuss about the recent turn of unfortunate events that has put our company’s market position in jeopardy. So, what’s the status, everybody?” His eyes went to the CTO – Rajat.

“The development team is working with the security analysts to find a fix but so far they haven’t found any security vulnerabilities in the app but then our cybersecurity specialists had shocking news for us” Rajat paused. Everyone in the room was looking at him intently.

“We backtracked all the fake orders placed based on the customer complaints we received. They were booked under the same IP address and that IP address pointed to our data centre here in Gurugram.” Rajat finished. A commotion broke out and people were discussing loudly between them till Deepinder interrupted asking them to stop. Rajat continued.

“We have deployed a team to our data centre to dig deeper and find out the person behind all of this. So, we expect to find something by today and I’ll keep everyone posted regarding this.” Rajat drank some water from the bottle in front of him though he wasn’t thirsty.

“Most of the orders were accepted by the customers but still they complained that the order was placed without their consent and were entirely sure that nobody else placed their order. However, they said that they were thinking of ordering the same food that was delivered and so accepted the order,” said Anand – the chief marketing officer.

“We may have to shut down our services for a while, at least until this is sorted out,” Deepinder said in a low tone. Everybody nodded in unison.

“Rajat, make sure that we find the culprit by EOD, we have a lot at stake. End of meeting.” Rajat nodded and everyone left the room.

The next day, some 10 km away from the Jomato Headquarters:

Jim picked the morning newspaper and started reading the headline. He went through the article several times till his face turned pale. He threw the newspaper aside and dashed out of his house. He got into his car and sped away.