Spring 2026.

A few days ago our internet went down. Every customer. Every line. Here's what that night taught me.

No warning. Just, gone.

Phones started ringing within minutes. Customers frustrated. Staff scrambling. Every escalation path hitting the same wall.

First major downtime in all time.

We stayed calm, communicated honestly, and when it was over we waived charges for everyone who lost service. No fine print. You didn't get what you paid for, so you don't pay.

The line came back. But that night sitting with the chaos, I kept thinking about something much bigger than the outage.

There are villages where people have never had reliable internet. Students uploading assignments when they occasionally get signal. Businesses cut off from the economy the rest of India takes for granted.

We want to reach them. ₹249/month. Fiber where fiber has never gone.
Not because it's the most profitable move. Because connectivity is not a luxury and someone has to believe that enough to actually do it.

The network went down because a human decision at a provider failed. A misconfiguration. A missed alert.

What if the network could heal itself?

That's what we're building toward at OpenLoop. AI that doesn't just monitor networks, AI that understands them well enough to diagnose, reroute, and recover without waiting for a human to SSH in at 2am.

Kashmir sits at the geographic heart of North India. Himalayan winters that make natural cooling effortless. The natural home for data centers, peering infrastructure, the backbone the entire northern region will need as it develops.

Nobody is thinking about Kashmir this way yet.

That's exactly why we are.

I'm 21. Bootstrapped. Building from Srinagar.

The downtime was a reminder that we're still early. The work is daily and unglamorous and occasionally chaotic.

But the vision is clear.

And clear vision, more than anything else, is what survives the chaos.

Day 16 of my 30-day build-in-public series.