Back in 2015-16, I once accidentally deleted the “entire production” at Practo.

Slight exaggeration, but here’s what happened…

There was one EC2 server running the whole stack for one of the acquired companies. On a Sunday afternoon, while cleaning up unused servers from an AWS account, I deleted this EC2 by mistake, and there was no data backup.

The moment I realized (~4 hours later) what I had done, my heart dropped. Panic. Fear. A voice in my head saying: Maybe nobody will notice. Maybe just stay quiet.

I stayed quiet while the team tried to figure out who deleted the instance. When my manager discovered it was me, instead of getting angry, he spoke with me as usual and treated it like a normal mistake.

Thankfully, the data was not highly sensitive or mission critical, but it still should not have happened. Of course, after the incident, we added the necessary guardrails to ensure we do not find ourselves in a similar situation again.

That day, I learned something important: mistakes are inevitable, and the best way to handle them is to face them.

One bad moment should not and would not define your career. A single accident does not erase all your hard work. What matters is what you do next.

People remember:

• Honesty
• Accountability
• How quickly you learn and recover

And I was trying to put mine under the carpet and hide it.

Hiding almost always makes things worse. It creates doubt and damages trust. Speaking up shows integrity. It shows others they can rely on you.

You are not the first person to make a massive mistake, and you will not be the last. We all have our stories. The key is to own it, fix what you can, and take one small lesson forward.

Fun fact: if you never touch production, you will never break production. But you will also never grow, never lead, and never build anything important.

If you want to build, you have to be willing to accept the times you break.