greetful went down for two days.

Not a few minutes. Not a “quick blip while we deploy.” Two full days of greetful showing a black screen to anyone who visited.

Here’s the story. Brace yourself.

I made a small, innocent tweak. A tiny thing. The kind of fix you don’t think twice about.

I was trying to get the link previews looking nicer when people shared greetful on Messenger. It was all grey and corporate, not at all greetful. It needed fixing, so in I went. I’d already sorted email, WhatsApp and everything else, but Messenger was being stubborn.

That was when my greetful world caved in.

It was down. Not just a few minutes down. Properly down.

My months of work, my 2:30 am finishes, my early morning starts accompanied by a frothy coffee, the toil, everything I’d built… gone.

Where my beautifully crafted app had once stood was now the black screen of ruin.

I don’t mind telling you I was somewhat frustrated to say the least. My family quickly learned I was not approachable for funny videos, missing shirts or frivolous chit chat.

What followed was two days of DNS records, proxy clouds, TXT verification, propagation times that felt endless, and the spinner of doom that I knew, deep in my soul, was not going to magically bring greetful back, as much as it promised “this can take up to 48 hours”, I knew that 48 hours would come and go and greetful would not be making a reappearance.

I learned more about how the internet actually works than I ever wanted to, all while quietly wondering if the app I’d poured months into would ever re enter our world.

But during that time, I started thinking. What if it is lost? What does that mean? And I realised I had learnt so many lessons while building greetful that if it was gone, I would simply start again. When I say “simply”, I just need to be clear, this wasn’t my preferred option, but, it was an option. There was no way I was letting all this go to waste.

I better understood the path now. I knew the mistakes not to repeat. It wouldn’t take the same time to rebuild.

I’d already decided that was what I would do.

But, before that happened, I finally had the breakthrough.

From what I can remember, the actual problem was one small setting I switched on and then off again. It broke the connection between my domain and the app. That was it. Nothing dramatic. Just a simple thing that caused a very big thing.

The fix wasn’t clever. It was patiently rebuilding the connection piece by piece until everything finally recognised itself again.

Two days. A lot of tea. A lot of finding out who I actually was, whilst blotting out the mayhem of my self-induced crisis.

And with the brass bands playing, the fireworks banging and everyone cheering, greetful made its joyful return. I hadn’t got to start again, which was a huge relief.

But I could have done. I would have done.

Often, when you have setbacks, there is a way through. It may not be ideal, but you need to decide if it is worth taking the new path that has just opened up in front of you.

greetful’s still here. So am I. It did not break me.