Checklist: What to Do Immediately After a Multi‑Provider Outage

Hook: When cross-provider outages go dark, your customers notice in minutes — here’s exactly what to do

Cross-provider outages in late 2025 and early 2026 (Cloudflare, major CDNs, and large cloud regions) made one thing clear: organizations that lack a concise, prioritized runbook spend hours guessing what to do next. If you’re a dev, SRE, or IT leader, this checklist gives a single-page operational plan to follow in the first 60, 180, and 720 minutes after multi-provider failures so you can stabilize services, coordinate communications, and preserve compliance and security posture.

Top-level guidance (inverted pyramid)

First: stop hunting for root cause. Prioritize impact, customer-facing stabilization, and clear communication. Use the timelines below — 0–60, 60–180, 180–720 minutes — to coordinate action. Apply your organization’s SLA, SLO and compliance rules while performing fast, auditable steps that keep data safe. Less noise, more outputs.

Key rules to follow immediately

• Prioritize people and customers — status updates beat speculation.
• Contain and stabilize before deep diagnostics.
• Preserve forensic evidence — do not overwrite logs or snapshots unless necessary.
• Follow compliance playbooks for data incidents (GDPR, HIPAA, PCI as applicable) — align with a data sovereignty checklist when cross-border data is involved.
• Document every action — timestamps, actors, and commands matter for postmortem and billing disputes.

0–60 minutes: Triage, mitigate customer impact, start communications

Within the first hour you must triage impact, start incident communications, and perform quick mitigations that reduce blast radius. Think: make customers less angry, keep systems safe, and buy time for deeper action.

1. Immediate triage (0–10 minutes)

• Trigger your incident response channel (Slack/Teams) and call the on-call SRE/ICM. Keep the channel focused and invite only essential roles: SRE lead, platform, security, legal/GPDR lead, product owner, and communications.
• Set the incident severity and target communicator: P1/P0 must have an Incident Commander (IC) and clear delegations.
• Gather a one-line summary: affected providers, services, estimated customer impact. Use health dashboards, synthetic tests, and provider status pages.
• Capture initial evidence: screenshots of provider status pages (Cloudflare, AWS, GCP, Azure, major CDNs), error messages, and DownDetector spikes. Preserve logs in an immutable store if possible.

2. Quick mitigation steps (10–30 minutes)

• Enable fail-safes: switch to static maintenance pages served from a geographically redundant object store (S3/Blob with public read and CDN fallback) if web front-ends are unavailable.
• If DNS is impacted, reduce TTLs proactively (if provider allows) and fail over to secondary authoritative DNS (if preconfigured). Example:

  dig +short NS yourdomain.com

  If using an alternate DNS provider, update records via API to point to secondary IPs or load balancer endpoints.
• Confirm authentication and payment pipelines first — if these are down, stop jobs that could produce inconsistent state (e.g., payment replays, order processing).
• Prevent cascading failures: scale down nonessential background workers to reduce load on partially healthy systems.

3. Communications: set expectations (10–60 minutes)

Clear and frequent messaging reduces inbound noise and builds trust.

• Publish an initial status page entry and post to primary customer channels. Use a template:

Initial status (t+20m): We are investigating a cross-provider network/service disruption impacting web and API traffic. Engineers are engaged and working with providers. Next update: t+30 minutes.

• Notify internal stakeholders (ops, sales, legal, C-suite) with a concise situation report: scope, customer segments affected, short mitigation plan, and next update cadence.
• Set update cadence: every 15–30 minutes for the first 2 hours or until stabilized.

60–180 minutes: Containment, controlled failover, and evidence preservation

After the first hour you should have reduced immediate customer impact and stabilized critical paths. Now shift to controlled failover, deeper diagnostics, and compliance-safe evidence collection.

4. Controlled failover (60–120 minutes)

• Execute pre-approved failover runbooks. Prioritize systems in this order: auth & identity → payments → APIs → customer-facing web → admin/ops consoles → batch jobs.
• If you have multi-region or multi-cloud active-passive setups, promote the passive region. Use provider CLIs carefully and record each command. Example AWS promote (if RDS replica exists):

  aws rds promote-read-replica --db-instance-identifier my-replica

  For managed services in other clouds, follow equivalent documented steps. Consider multi-control-plane patterns described in hybrid edge orchestration.
• For DNS-based failover, change records with short TTLs and monitor propagation. Use APIs and automation rather than console GUIs to reduce error.
• For BGP/edge issues, coordinate with your network team and any transit/colo providers. If you maintain BGP control, consider withdrawing problematic prefixes or shifting to an alternate ASN path.

5. Security & compliance containment (60–180 minutes)

• Determine if this is purely availability or if security/consent/data integrity is affected. If there's any sign of data exfiltration or abnormal access, invoke your breach response playbook immediately.
• Preserve logs and snapshots in immutable storage (Object Lock / WORM). Avoid deleting or rotating logs prematurely — these are essential for regulators and forensic teams. See the data sovereignty checklist for cross-border considerations.
• If required by regulation, prepare initial notifications to regulators and impacted customers. For GDPR/UK-GDPR, begin data controller workflows; for PCI, engage your QSA and follow incident reporting SLAs.
• Collect and lock down IAM changes: review recent role and policy edits, temporarily rotate service credentials if compromise is suspected, and enable MFA enforcement for all admin accounts.

6. Deep diagnostics & provider engagement (90–180 minutes)

• Open or escalate tickets with affected providers. Provide concise, reproducible test cases, timestamps, and correlation IDs. Keep a single thread per provider to avoid fragmentation.
• Correlate telemetry across providers: network traces, CDN logs, API gateway metrics, and application logs. Use eBPF-based network tracing or distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry) to find where requests fail.
• Avoid broad config churn. If a change is required, use canary/targeted rollouts and document rollback steps.

180–720 minutes: Restore, validate, and prepare postmortem

With containment and temporary fixes in place, focus on full restoration, validation, and communications that feed a useful post-incident review.

7. Restore and validate services (3–12 hours)

• Follow your restore priority list and bring services back in controlled phases. Validate each step with synthetic tests and customer-facing transactions.
• Re-enable paused jobs gradually and monitor for data inconsistencies. If replaying queued jobs (e.g., payment webhooks), throttle replays to avoid duplication and use idempotency keys.
• Run integrity checks on databases and object stores. Use checksums and compare snapshoted data where you have critical RPO requirements.
• Check and verify backups: ensure that automated backups completed and are restorable. Example snapshot verification: periodically run restore drills to a non-prod environment and validate app behavior. Keep immutable backups where regulators require retention.

8. Cost, SLA, and contractual tracking (3–12 hours)

• Track downtime against your SLAs. Log impacted customers, minutes of downtime, and any degraded service periods for credits or remediation with providers.
• Start cost-control steps: if failovers increase egress or replication costs, apply rate-limits or temporary profile changes and inform finance for chargeback accounting.
• Open billing claims with providers where outages exceed contractual uptime guarantees; preserve timestamps and ticket IDs for disputes.

9. Post-incident compliance and legal steps (6–12 hours)

• Confirm whether incident is reportable under regulations (e.g., GDPR breach within 72 hours). If reportable, draft the notification with legal and data protection officer (DPO) input.
• Produce an auditable timeline: who did what, when, and why. This timeline will be critical for regulators, customers, and insurance claims.
• Coordinate with PR and customer success to prepare long-form customer communications once the incident is fully understood.

Actionable templates and commands

Use these snippets in your runbook. Adapt to your environment and rehearse them in chaos days.

Incident comms template — initial status

Subject: [Incident] Cross-provider network/service outage — investigating
Summary: We are investigating an outage affecting web/API traffic impacting X% of customers. Engineers engaged. Impact: authentication, API errors, and web load failures.
Next update: t+30m

API/CLI commands (examples)

• Promote DB replica (AWS RDS):

  aws rds promote-read-replica --db-instance-identifier my-replica

• Rotate a compromised service key (example):

  vault write -f auth/aws/role/my-service

  and update deployments via CI/CD.
• Publish a static maintenance page to S3 and invalidate CDN cache:

  aws s3 cp maintenance.html s3://my-static-site/index.html
  aws cloudfront create-invalidation --distribution-id E123 --paths "/index.html"

Restore priority matrix (make this your canonical list)

Assign a numeric priority and owner for each service. Example matrix:

• P0 — Critical: Auth, Payments, Core API (owner: SRE-auth, SRE-payments)
• P1 — High: Customer-facing web, API endpoints, Notifications (owner: frontend, API teams)
• P2 — Medium: Admin consoles, Internal dashboards
• P3 — Low: Batch jobs, ETL, non-time-sensitive analytics

Security & backup quick checklist

• Ensure immutable backups are retained and not overwritten during incident operations.
• Lock down service accounts and rotate credentials if suspicious access is detected.
• Validate object storage and DB snapshots — check last successful backup time and test a sample restore in a sandbox.
• Use WORM/Retention policies for logs you may later need for regulatory proof.

Coordination cadence & stakeholder updates

Set expectations early. A predictable cadence reduces friction and helps leadership make decisions.

• 0–60 minutes: updates every 15–30 minutes.
• 60–180 minutes: every 30–60 minutes, include remediation progress and any failover actions taken.
• 180–720 minutes: hourly until services are stable; then a transition note to “monitoring mode” with final restore summary.

Advanced strategies and 2026 trends to use after this incident

Late 2025 and early 2026 accelerated three practices you should adopt to reduce future cross-provider blast radius:

• Multi-control-plane automation: Use a single orchestrated runbook (Terraform/Ansible + provider CLIs) to perform coordinated failovers. The industry shifted to multi-cloud control planes in 2025 to reduce operator error during outages. See hybrid edge orchestration playbooks for patterns.
• Edge resilience patterns: Push critical read-only experiences to edge functions and object caches so core failures produce graceful degradation, not total failure. Modern edge runtimes and eBPF observability make this practical in 2026 — related reading: edge-oriented cost & resilience.
• AI-assisted incident detection: Adopt anomaly detection that correlates cross-provider telemetry (CDN + cloud + ISP) to identify provider-side incidents vs. your own faults quickly. Consider workflows inspired by AI-triage automation guides like AI-assisted triage.

Postmortem and continuous improvement

Within 72 hours, assemble a blameless postmortem that includes:

• A clear timeline of events and actions taken.
• Root cause and contributing factors, including provider issues vs. internal misconfigurations. Use postmortem templates and incident comms guidance from postmortem template resources.
• Lessons learned and a prioritized remediation backlog: automation gaps, DR playbook updates, SLO changes, and customer compensation rules.
• An actionable test plan to validate fixes (chaos tests and runbook drills).

Checklist recap: the runbook in one page

0–60 minutes

• Open incident channel and assign IC.
• Publish initial status and set update cadence.
• Preserve logs and take screenshots of provider statuses.
• Enable temporary mitigations (maintenance page, scale down workers).

60–180 minutes

• Perform controlled failovers following priority matrix.
• Lock down credentials if suspicious activity detected.
• Escalate to providers with detailed telemetry.
• Collect immutable evidence for compliance.

180–720 minutes

• Restore services gradually and validate by synthetic tests.
• Run integrity checks and verify backups are restorable.
• Track SLA impact and start billing/credit processes.
• Publish a customer-facing status report and begin postmortem preparations.

Final recommendations

Practice this runbook quarterly. Use chaos engineering to validate your failovers, and automate as much of the runbook as possible so teams can execute reliably under stress. In 2026, vendor outages will remain possible — the difference is whether your organization responds with a practiced, auditable runbook or chaotic firefighting.

Call to action

If you don’t have a consolidated multi-provider runbook yet, start with this one: adapt the timelines to your SLAs, add provider-specific API commands to your secure runbook repo, and schedule a live drill this quarter. Need a templated runbook customized to your stack (Kubernetes, serverless, hybrid cloud)? Contact our team for a tailored runbook and a guided tabletop exercise. Also consider hybrid micro-studio and edge-backed production playbooks for distributed teams (hybrid micro-studio playbook).