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Incident response

Intermediate 8 min read

What to do when production breaks: stabilise first, communicate, then learn from it without blame.

Why it matters

Outages happen to every team. A calm, practised routine shortens them; a blameless review afterwards stops the same one happening again — and feeds the next plan.

Where it fits

  1. Plan & Design
  2. Develop
  3. Version control
  4. Verify
  5. Build & Package
  6. CI/CD
  7. Deploy
  8. ● Operate

What you will learn

  • Follow the first steps when an alert fires.
  • Prefer mitigation (rollback, switch off a feature) over a hurried fix.
  • Write a short blameless postmortem.

Before you start

During the incident

  1. Acknowledge
  2. Assess impact
  3. Mitigate
  4. Communicate
  5. Resolve
  • One person coordinates; others investigate. Say who is doing what.
  • Mitigate first: roll back the last release, switch off the new feature, add capacity. Find the root cause after users are fine.
  • Post short status updates at regular times, even when nothing changed.
  • Write down what you did and when — memory is unreliable at 3 a.m.

After the incident

  • A timeline of what happened and when.
  • The impact: who was affected, for how long.
  • Why it happened — the conditions, not the person.
  • A few concrete follow-up actions, each with an owner.

Tip: Being able to roll back in minutes is the best incident tool there is. Practise it before you need it.

Official documentation and references

Learn next

Related topics

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Reviewed 2026-10-23. Links go to the official documentation unless marked otherwise.