Sev1 First 15 Minutes

When to use

Use for a confirmed high-severity production incident.

Preconditions

• You have an incident channel and a path to page additional responders.

Procedure

1. Declare severity and open an incident channel.
2. Assign roles: incident commander, comms lead, operations lead.
3. State the customer impact in one sentence.
4. Stabilize first: stop the bleeding (rollback, disable feature, shed load).
5. Start a timeline and capture key actions/decisions.

Decision points

• If impact is unknown: prioritize measurement and narrowing scope.
• If rollback is low-risk and likely effective: rollback early.
• If data integrity is at risk: freeze writes and escalate.

Verification

• Leading indicators improve (error rate, latency, saturation).
• Customer reports decrease.
• Comms cadence is established.

Rollback / undo

• If mitigation worsens impact, revert and try the next lowest-risk action.

Escalation

• Escalate to security if incident involves auth, data exposure, or suspicious activity.
• Escalate to leadership if SLA/SLO breach is likely.

Examples

Initial update template: