Hundreds of orders go through at zero dollars
Your task
It is 10:05 on a Tuesday. Finance posts in the on-call channel: revenue this morning is far below normal, but order volume looks fine. You check:
- Since 09:30, 412 orders have a total of $0.00. A normal morning has 2 or 3.
- 409 of those 412 orders used the promo code
SPRING10. Marketing emailed it to newsletter subscribers at 09:00 as 10% off. - The promotions admin shows that
SPRING10was last edited at 09:27. No code has been deployed since yesterday. - A thread on a deals forum titled "free stuff here" links to the shop and has 300 replies.
- The warehouse picks the morning's orders for same-day shipping at 13:00.
What do you do in the next 30 minutes, and what do you change afterwards?
It covers
- Blast radius
- Config change
- Stop the bleeding