How we handle incidents
"Our playbook for stabilizing production systems during outages and database failures."
Why this exists
Production failures are inevitable in high-traffic software. Panic is the enemy of recovery. This protocol establishes strict roles and actions to stabilize systems with speed.
Operational Flow
Detect: Monitor alerts triggers. The finder declares the incident in the system channel.
Assign: Appoint an Incident Commander to orchestrate the resolution. The commander does not code; they coordinate tasks.
Stabilize: Prioritize mitigation over finding the root cause. Roll back, route around, or throttle traffic.
Communicate: Send progress reports to the team and affected clients every 15 minutes.
Resolve: Confirm metrics are healthy before closing the incident status.
Review: Write a blameless post-mortem within 24 hours detailing changes to prevent recurrence.
What good looks like
- Declaring the incident immediately instead of attempting solo triage for hours.
- Choosing a rollback over attempting to patch faulty code in production.
- Providing clear status updates devoid of defensive explanations.
What NOT to do
- Do not run unverified SQL migrations or schema changes under stress.
- Do not hide failures from clients or other engineers.
- Do not blame individuals for systemic design failures.
When production goes down, we act with military-grade focus. We do not search for who committed the code; we search for how to bring the system back online. The post-mortem is the place for analysis.