The Cutover
Down for some, fine for othersYou are on the platform team. It is 11:30 on Monday. Support is drowning, nobody internally can reproduce it, and the first person to say something confident will be believed.
"We moved the website to the new server on Friday night. Since then some customers say it is down, some say it is fine, and a few say it looks like the old site. Support is getting hammered. Did the migration fail?"
You are judged on three things. Accuracy: did you work out what was really wrong and deal with it. Economy: how directly you got there, in the incident’s own minutes. Integrity: what you preserved, who you told, and whether you claimed anything you had not established. The third is the one people fail.
Finish it, with any outcome, and its interview pack unlocks: 3 questions with weak, good and strong answers, the follow-up, and the trap.
Choose one
Incident log
Everything you do, in order. This is what a real handover is written from.
Nothing has happened yet.
How bad is it
Wrong moves push this up. Containing the problem pushes it back down.
What you have established
Facts you have actually observed, not guesses.
Nothing yet.