Code Room
On-callMediumoc-g102
Subject Thundering herdLevel Mid–Senior~30 minCommon in Reliability & on-call interviewsIndustries Technology

Question

Every day at exactly midnight UTC, your shared Postgres and internal config service get hammered for ~90 seconds: CPU spikes, latency for unrelated online traffic degrades, and you see a burst of identical queries. It turns out hundreds of services each run a `0 0 * * *` cron that refreshes a cached config blob and recomputes daily aggregates at exactly 00:00:00. The fleet has grown, so the midnight spike now causes real customer-facing latency. How do you triage and flatten the spike?

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.

Diagram & narrate the incident
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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.