Situational & Hypothetical
Crisis & Incident Scenarios
18 practice questions. Free questions open a full answer guide; the rest unlock with Pro.
- You're on call and an alert fires for an outage in a service you've barely touched. Your senior is offline. What do you do in the first 15 minutes?
- A security scan flags a critical CVE in a base Docker image used by 15 microservices in production. How do you handle it?Go Pro
- You realize a change you merged earlier today is what caused a live incident the team is now scrambling to fix. What do you do?Go Pro
- Your team's velocity has dropped 30% over the past two sprints and engineers say they're working harder than ever. What do you do?Go Pro
- A model you own has been quietly losing accuracy in production for weeks — no alerts fired, but a downstream team noticed their numbers drifting. How do you handle it?Go Pro
- You deploy a release that ships an irreversible database migration (a column was renamed and the old one dropped). Twenty minutes in, you find the new code has a bug causing a steady stream of failed checkouts. A normal rollback would redeploy the old code, but the old code expects the dropped column. What do you do?Go Pro
- A high-severity production outage just got resolved after a four-hour incident. The engineer who shipped the change that caused it is visibly shaken and apologizing in the team channel. How do you handle the next 24 hours?Go Pro
- A prolonged production outage owned by your org takes down a top customer's service during their peak season. The customer is publicly angry and threatening to churn. The CEO wants answers in two hours. How do you lead through it?Go Pro
- Your product's core activation metric has dropped 20% week-over-week for three consecutive weeks. Leadership wants a root cause and a remediation plan by end of week. How do you approach this?Go Pro
- Your team's deployment pipeline just pushed a bad release to production. Error rates jumped from 0.1% to 18% within five minutes. Walk me through your response.Go Pro
- A new microservice your team owns is hitting the database with 10x its expected query volume after a traffic spike. The DB CPU is at 95%. How do you respond and what longer-term fixes do you propose?Go Pro
- Your org just experienced a sudden spike in attrition — three senior engineers across two teams resign in the same month. How do you diagnose and respond?Go Pro
- Your detection tooling surfaces signs that a set of cloud credentials may be actively exfiltrating data right now, but you can't yet tell whether it's a real attacker, a misconfigured automation, or a false positive. How do you decide what to contain versus preserve, and how do you run this?Go Pro
- During a change freeze period, a critical security patch for a production vulnerability is approved. How do you coordinate the deployment while minimising risk?Go Pro
- You push a change that takes down a key feature in production during business hours. You're the only engineer who fully understands the change. Walk me through what you do.Go Pro
- You're on call and receive an alert: one of your ECS services is consuming 400% of its expected memory and is being OOM-killed every 2 minutes. How do you diagnose and resolve it?Go Pro
- You're paged into a SEV1 as incident commander and discover the on-call engineer has been quietly firefighting it alone for almost an hour without declaring an incident. Customer impact is real and growing. How do you take command and run it from here?Go Pro
- You take over a team that is badly burned out from on-call — they get paged dozens of times a night, most pages aren't actionable, and they've started ignoring alerts entirely. How do you turn this around?Go Pro
Want questions matched to your role? Paste a job title, job description, or CV for a personalized set, or go Pro to unlock the full bank.