On-callMediumoc-g504

Subject Dependency outagesLevel Mid–Senior~30 minCommon in Reliability & on-call · Code quality & review interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Your services fetch feature flags and dynamic config from a managed flag service (LaunchDarkly-style) at startup and via a streaming connection. At 16:00 the flag service has an outage. Within minutes, several of your services start misbehaving — some new pods crash on boot, and a few features flip to their 'off/default' state, breaking flows that depended on a flag being ON. Dashboards: the flag SDK logs streaming-connection errors and 'falling back to defaults'; your own services are otherwise healthy. 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.

Learn the concepts

Diagram & narrate the incident

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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.