No prioritization under overload
Your API gateway fronts a fleet of services during an unexpected 3x traffic surge. Everything degrades uniformly: health checks, login, paid-customer API calls, and a cheap free-tier polling endpoint all slow to multi-second responses and timeouts, so even health checks fail and instances get killed and restarted, worsening the surge. There is no per-tier throttling — every request competes equally. CPU is pinned fleet-wide. You can't add capacity fast enough. How do you triage and stabilize service for what matters most?
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.