mediumScenarioBehaviouralMidSeniorStaffLead
You get paged, the service is down, and nobody else is online yet. How do you run the incident?
5 min readUpdated 2026-08-15
Answer
Short answer
Declare it, take the incident commander role explicitly, and mitigate before you diagnose - roll back or shed load first, understand later. Keep one channel as the record, publish updates on a fixed cadence, hand over rather than push through, and let the review produce owned actions instead of narrative.
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Likely follow-ups
- You are the only person online and the mitigation needs two pairs of hands. What do you do first?
- How do you decide between rolling back and rolling forward with a fix?
- A postmortem concludes that an engineer ran the wrong command. What is missing from that conclusion?
- What would make you page a human at 3am versus raise a ticket for the morning?
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