No. My boss kept me busy with other things. After the work my colleague had done, he was convinced that we weren't going to solve it, and the idea that I was going to get to work on it turned out to be kind of a white lie so the original engineer could mentally let go and get his sanity back. I didn't have many fresh ideas anyway.

In retrospect, there's an obvious suspect. It was early AWS days, and our deployments were controlled by sysadmins, who refused to give us any access to the infrastructure on security grounds. Our dev boxes were in our datacenter. They promised us the infrastructure we were running on was 100% reliable and consistent, but it probably wasn't.