All tabletop exercises
Outage / resilience·Starter·Executive audience
Checkout fails during the biggest sales hour of the year
The prompt — read this to the room
It is 20:05 on Black Friday. Your online retailer's checkout has been failing for 18 minutes; about one payment attempt in three times out. The promotional email to 2.4 million customers went out at 20:00. Revenue for this hour last year was $1.9 million. Engineering thinks the payment provider is rate-limiting you; the payment provider says its systems are healthy. Social media has noticed, and a competitor has just extended its own sale by an hour. The CEO has joined the bridge and wants to know whether to pause the promotion. What do you decide in the next ten minutes?
Total duration
1 h 15 min
People to involve
6
Best fit
Retail
Who to involve
Most important first.
- CEO / Managing director
- CIO / CTO
- CFO / Finance
- IT operations
- Communications / PR
- Customer support
What it tests
- Make a time-boxed business decision (pause, extend or ride it out) with the facts available
- Run the bridge with one incident commander and clear roles while the CEO is present
- Escalate effectively to a third-party provider that says it is healthy
- Communicate honestly with customers about prices, orders and duplicate charges
Outline of activities
- 1Failure at peak: the first numbers
- 2Who runs the bridge
- 3Pause, extend or ride it out
- 4Provider escalation and duplicate charges
- 5Customer message and recovery
Run sheet (Pro)
The facilitator's timeline of execution, the detailed steps for running the session and the questions to ask each person.
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