Inventory shows in stock intermittently
Support escalates at 13:00: customers report that products they marked out-of-stock are still showing as 'in stock' on the storefront, leading to oversold orders, but only on some page loads and it 'sometimes corrects itself after a while.' The storefront reads inventory through a Redis cache with a 5-minute TTL. An hour earlier, you deployed a change that moved inventory updates to an async background worker queue to speed up the admin panel. There were no errors anywhere. How do you triage and fix?
What a strong answer looks like
Stop the bleeding first (mitigate), then form hypotheses from real signals. Separate root cause from symptom, communicate status as you go, and close with what prevents a repeat.
0:00 of about 30 min
Which questions mattered is sealed until you submit. Telling you now would just be handing over the edge cases.
Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.