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Production Server Postmortem

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Joy Obekpa
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2 min read

Incident Postmortem: Major Outage on Production Server

Summary: On March 1st, 2023, our software company experienced a major outage on our production server, which impacted our customers and resulted in significant revenue loss. The outage lasted for approximately 4 hours and was caused by a combination of factors, including a bug in our software code, an unexpected surge in traffic, and inadequate redundancy measures.

Timeline:

  • 12:00 pm: Traffic on the production server starts to increase due to a new marketing campaign.

  • 1:30 pm: The first error is reported by a customer, indicating that they are unable to access our software.

  • 1:45 pm: The team identifies the issue as a bug in our software code and begins working on a fix.

  • 2:30 pm: The number of error reports increases, and we realize that the issue is more widespread than initially thought.

  • 3:00 pm: Our redundancy measures fail to kick in, and the server crashes, causing a complete outage.

  • 3:30 pm: The team implements a temporary fix, and the server is brought back online.

  • 4:00 pm: The team begins a comprehensive investigation into the root cause of the outage.

Root Cause Analysis: After a thorough investigation, the team identified the following root causes:

  • A bug in our software code, which caused the server to overload when traffic increased beyond a certain threshold.

  • Inadequate redundancy measures, which failed to handle the sudden surge in traffic.

  • A lack of communication and coordination between teams, which delayed the response and resolution time.

Corrective Actions: To prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future, we have implemented the following corrective actions:

  • Conducted a code review and implemented changes to address the bug in our software code.

  • Improved our redundancy measures by implementing load balancing and failover mechanisms.

  • Established better communication and coordination protocols between teams to ensure a faster response time.

  • Conducted a post-incident review to identify additional areas for improvement.

Lessons Learned: This incident highlighted the importance of proper redundancy measures and the need for effective communication and coordination between teams. We have also learned that it is essential to conduct regular code reviews to identify and address potential issues before they result in significant outages. Finally, we have learned the importance of conducting a post-incident review to ensure that we are continuously improving our processes and procedures.