Code Room
On-callMediumoc-g235
Subject FailoverLevel Mid–Senior~30 minCommon in Networking & APIs · Reliability & on-call interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

A managed Postgres failover (planned maintenance) promoted a standby and updated the cluster's writer DNS endpoint. Most app instances recovered, but a subset kept erroring with 'cannot execute INSERT in a read-only transaction' for ~25 minutes, and a few writes from that subset later appeared to be lost. The healthy instances use the writer endpoint and are fine. The affected subset is an older service. Triage, mitigate, and prevent.

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.