Code Room
On-callHardoc-g500
Subject Third party downLevel Senior–Staff~35 minCommon in Reliability & on-call interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

You receive payment webhooks from a vendor to mark orders paid. At 14:30 a fraction of orders sit in 'pending payment' though customers were charged. The vendor's status page is green and they confirm they're sending. Dashboards: your webhook endpoint is returning 200s and inbound webhook volume looks roughly normal — but your endpoint's p99 ACK latency crept from 80ms to 6s starting 14:25, and the vendor's delivery dashboard (shared) shows it backing off and DELAYING redeliveries because your slow 200s look like near-failures. No vendor outage; you deployed a webhook-handler change at 14:20. 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.

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