Payment provider degradation
It's a Tuesday afternoon and your checkout service's p99 latency jumps from 180ms to 9s. Error rate on /checkout climbs to 22%. Dashboards show your payment provider's API (Stripe charge creation) returning a mix of HTTP 503s and connections that hang until your 10s client timeout fires. Your own CPU, memory, and DB metrics are flat-to-low. There was no deploy in the last 6 hours. The Stripe status page just flipped one component to 'degraded.' Inbound checkout traffic is normal for the time of day. How do you triage and mitigate?
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.