Yeah I've had that one happen. Big team, more than a year of work, thousands of hours, over 1500 of my own hours. Internal presentation to the team at the customer end, they loved it and couldn't wait for actual launch day. We were all so proud and everyone was happy.

Alas that day never came, the customer went bankrupt due to one of the investors pulling out. Nothing to do with us, just some bean counter did the math and decided they were better off letting the company fold.

I spoke to one of the people at the customer we had worked with throughout the project. She was devastated it was all for nothing and she lost her job as a result. By the time a new investor came around to pick up the pieces, she had found a new job. Spoke to the former ceo of the customer, he had a new job for a couple of days a week at the company that bought up the remainders. He fought to get the project going again, but the new company is very non IT focused, oldskool. So they vetoed it. I later found out one of the project leads was consulted and he had pretty much killed any chance. I always disliked that dude, but he got a pretty good deal out of it or so I'm told.

That's just the way the cookie crumbles sometimes.