Code Room
On-callHardoc-p045
Subject Incident responseLevel Senior–Staff~20 minCommon in Reliability & on-call interviewsIndustries Technology

Question

Some services can reach a dependency and others can't — a partial network partition. Failures are intermittent depending on which host serves the request. How do you diagnose?

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.