Service recovery cascades into overload
A core internal service briefly hiccups at 20:00 (a 5-second blip during a leader election). Instead of recovering, it stays down: it comes back up, gets instantly flooded to many times its normal request volume, falls over again, and this cycle repeats every ~30 seconds. Five upstream services all call it; each retries failed calls 3x immediately, and several have their own callers that also retry. Request volume to the struggling service is now ~8x baseline even though end-user traffic is normal. Triage and break the cycle.
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 40 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.