You’ve survived outages. What happened when the only person who knew the fix left?

An engineer quickly resolved a critical outage but left without documenting the fix. When they departed months later and the same issue recurred, the team struggled to recover, causing revenue loss. The lesson: relying on individual heroes doesn't scale. The solution is disciplined post-incident documentation—writing down fixes immediately after recovery while the context is fresh, ensuring knowledge transfer and team resilience.