IntermediateSITUATIONAL
Tell me about a situation where a production or high-priority system outage occurred while you were on duty. What exact steps did you take from a technical and communication standpoint, and what did you learn from that incident?
Other
General

Sample Answer

During a Friday afternoon deployment at my last company, our main customer portal went down for about 40,000 users. I was on call. First thing I did was freeze all new changes and switch our monitoring dashboard to a war-room view: error rates, latency, and database health. I confirmed it was a 503 spike on all web nodes, then quickly rolled back the last deploy via our CI/CD pipeline and drained traffic through the load balancer. In parallel, I opened an incident bridge, pulled in the on-call engineer and DBA, and posted updates to Slack every 10 minutes and a status-page notice within 5 minutes. We restored service in 21 minutes total. Afterward, I led the post-incident review and we added a pre-deploy DB migration check and improved runbooks. Outage minutes for similar incidents dropped by about 60% over the next quarter.

Keywords

Immediate stabilization and rollback stepsClear, time-boxed communication cadenceCross-team coordination via an incident bridgePost-incident review leading to measurable reduction in outage time
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