incident-responsedevopsoperations

Incident Response Template: Conducting Postmortems After Carrier and Cloud Outages

wwhites

2026-01-25

10 min read

Ready-to-use postmortem template for Verizon, AWS, and Cloudflare outages—step-by-step incident response, RCA, customer impact and remediation.

When Verizon, AWS, or Cloudflare go down: a practical postmortem template for production teams

Outages are costly—for engineering time, customer trust, and your reseller margins. In 2026, with multi-cloud and carrier dependencies multiplying, teams must close incidents faster and document them better. This article gives you a ready-to-use incident response and postmortem template tailored to carrier and cloud outages (Verizon, AWS, Cloudflare and similar). Use it immediately after an incident to analyze root cause, quantify customer impact, and drive remediation.

Why this matters in 2026

Late 2025 and early 2026 saw several high-impact provider incidents: national carrier outages affecting millions of subscribers, and spikes in outage reports for major cloud and edge platforms. These events highlight persistent risks in single-provider dependency, BGP/peering fragility, and orchestration complexity. Modern mitigations—RPKI, multi-homing, synthetic observability, and automated SLA crediting—are now widely available but properly applying them requires disciplined incident analysis.

Example: January 2026 telecom outages reminded teams that software configuration errors can ripple to millions—prompting renewed emphasis on automated failover and clearer provider RCAs.

Start here: Incident response checklist (first 60 minutes)

When you detect a carrier or cloud outage, follow this prioritized checklist. The goal is rapid mitigation, clear communications, and evidence collection for later RCA.

Declare incident and severity — Use your severity matrix (S0/S1/S2). If production customer-facing services are down at scale, declare highest severity.
Create a dedicated incident channel (chat + incident document). Add owners: Incident Commander, Communications, SRE lead, Network lead, and Vendor Liaison.
Stabilize user impact — Activate failover routes, scale up healthy regions, or switch to backup DNS/CDN. Prioritize customer-facing restores over internal systems.
Collect telemetry — RUM, synthetic checks, CDN logs, BGP monitors, traceroute, mtr, packet captures, provider status pages, provider syslog and control-plane events.
Notify stakeholders — Internal execs, support teams, and customers (with an initial status update and ETA if known).
Open vendor tickets — Prioritize escalations for carriers or cloud providers. Record ticket IDs and liaison contacts.

Postmortem template: ready-to-use structure

Paste and adapt this template into your incident document. Fill facts first, analysis second, and remediation last. Keep each section concise and evidence-backed.

1) Executive summary

Incident ID: e.g., 2026-01-16-VERIZON-NET
Severity: S1 (complete outage affecting >X% customers)
Start / End: 2026-01-16T09:12Z — 2026-01-16T17:46Z
Products impacted: Mobile auth, SMS OTPs, API gateway (list services)
Summary: Short one-paragraph description of what happened and high-level root cause hypothesis

2) Detection & timeline (chronological)

Give a minute-by-minute timeline of detection, mitigation, and resolution. Include exact timestamps and sources of evidence.

T+0 (09:12Z) — Synthetic probes from EU show 503 from API gateway (source: uptime monitor)
T+3m — Customer tickets spike; support triage marks issue as widespread
T+8m — BGP monitoring shows route withdrawal to our POPs (source: BGPStream)
T+20m — Carrier status page reports service degradation (record URL & snapshot)
T+1h — Failover triggered to secondary carrier; partial recovery observed
T+8h — Provider declares incident resolved; we confirm full recovery and close the incident

3) Scope & impact

Quantify impact across dimensions. Use concrete metrics and time ranges.

Customers affected: X paying customers, Y free users
API errors: 503 rate was Z% during peak window
Transactions lost: N failures; estimate revenue or SLA exposure
Support load: +M support tickets vs baseline; average response degradation
Regions impacted: list geographic distribution

4) Evidence & data collected

List the raw artifacts used in RCA. Store links and hashed files in the incident repo.

Provider status page snapshots and RSS feed entries
Traceroutes and MTR outputs from multiple locations (see edge analytics tooling for collection tips)
BGP updates and route collectors (BGPStream, RIPE RIS)
CDN/edge logs, load balancer errors, origin logs (see notes on CDN/edge integrations)
Packet captures (pcap) where allowed
Support ticket transcripts and vendor responses

5) Root cause analysis (RCA)

Use structured analysis methods: 5 Whys, fishbone, and time-series correlation. Avoid jumping to conclusions—present hypotheses and evidence.

Direct cause: e.g., carrier control-plane software misconfiguration caused route announcements to be withdrawn.
Contributing factors:
- Single-homed POP with no immediate failover
- DNS TTLs too long to pivot quickly
- Monitoring blind spots for control-plane events
Why it wasn't detected earlier: missing BGP alerts in our alerting rules, and synthetic checks concentrated on US-east only

6) Provider coordination & required artifacts

When outages are due to vendors (Verizon/AWS/Cloudflare), track escalations and demands for evidence. Use this checklist when requesting an RCA from a provider:

Open/ticket IDs and escalation contacts
Request for a full technical RCA with timelines and packet traces
Ask for impacted POPs, BGP table changes, and peering logs
Push for a remediation plan and timeline for hardening

7) Remediation & short-term mitigations

Immediate technical steps to prevent recurrence in the next 3 months.

Enable multi-homing for critical POPs and test failover weekly
Reduce DNS TTLs for critical endpoints to 60s during peak risk windows and document rollbacks
Add synthetic checks for control-plane signals (BGP withdrawals, route flaps)
Update runbooks to include carrier failover steps and automation triggers

8) Long-term prevention (6–18 months)

Implement RPKI-origin validation and monitor RPKI ROA coverage for ASNs
Contract language: insert clear SLAs, RCA timelines, and credit automation for carrier/cloud partners
Adopt Anycast configurations with multi-region advertisement strategies
Build automated route-testing CI checks as part of deploy pipelines
Design a multi-cloud architecture for critical control-plane services

9) Communication templates

Use short, factual, and frequently updated messages. Keep legal-safe language; avoid speculation.

Initial external status update (example)

Title: Service Degradation – Mobile auth and SMS OTPs

Message: We are aware of a service degradation impacting mobile authentication and SMS delivery. Our teams have declared an incident and are actively working with our carrier partner. We will provide updates every 30 minutes until resolved.

Post-incident update (example)

Message: The incident has been resolved. Root cause analysis is in progress; preliminary findings indicate a carrier control-plane software issue. We will publish a full postmortem within 72 hours with remediation steps and customer impact details.

10) Action items, owners, and deadlines

List every corrective action with a single owner, priority, and due date. Include verification criteria.

Implement carrier multi-homing for POP-1 — Owner: NetOps — Due: 2026-02-15 — Verification: failover test executed and documented
Lower TTL for critical endpoints during risk window — Owner: SRE — Due: 2026-01-22 — Verification: DNS query logs show TTL change
Update incident playbook with vendor escalation steps — Owner: SRE Manager — Due: 2026-01-25 — Verification: tabletop exercised

11) Metrics to monitor after remediation

Track these KPIs for 90 days post-remediation to validate effectiveness.

Mean time to detect (MTTD) for carrier control-plane issues
Mean time to failover (MTTFo) for multi-homed POPs
Percentage decrease in customer-impacting incidents
SLA credit automation success rate

Pro tips & advanced strategies

These are battle-tested practices from platform teams and resellers handling high availability for customers.

Automate failover tests: Integrate scheduled BGP route flaps in a safe lab and validate your failover automation. Treat the lab as production for testing failover playbooks.
Instrument the control plane: In 2026, control-plane observability is mainstream. Ingest BGP stream feeds, route origin changes, and peering session metrics into your observability stack.
Use synthetic users across carriers and regions: Don't rely on a single vantage point. Deploy lightweight probes in multiple carriers and regions to detect carrier-level issues early.
Prepare legal & billing playbooks: When providers commit credits (e.g., $20 credit examples after carrier outages), have processes to validate and apply credits back to affected customers when appropriate.
Tabletop exercises with providers: Run joint simulations with major carriers and cloud partners annually to validate roles and escalation paths.

Root cause techniques: a short how-to

Follow these steps when performing RCA after a complex outage.

Correlate across layers: Map network events (BGP, peering), infrastructure events (control-plane API errors), and application metrics (5xx spikes) on a single timeline.
Ask the 5 Whys: Keep drilling: Why did BGP withdraw? Because a configuration pushed. Why did config push succeed? Because safety check omitted. Continue until preventative action is clear.
Fishbone analysis: Break contributing factors into People, Process, Platform, and Vendor categories to identify systemic fixes beyond one-off patches.
Document unknowns: If vendor RCAs are delayed, record unanswered questions and follow-up actions to close them.

Sample timeline (copyable)

Use this template to build your timeline quickly.

09:12Z — Synthetic check failed (503) — source: eu-probe-1
09:15Z — Support tickets increase by 400% — first customer reports unable to receive OTP
09:18Z — BGP session to ASN X shows route withdrawal — BGPStream alert
09:25Z — Incident declared S1; Incident Commander assigned
09:40Z — Vendor ticket opened with Verizon, ticket #VZ-12345, escalated to Tier 3
10:05Z — Secondary carrier failover activated; partial recovery observed
17:46Z — Provider indicates resolved; we validate full traffic restoration

Automation snippets & commands to collect evidence

Run these during incidents to collect consistent diagnostics:

Traceroute: traceroute -n -w 2 -q 1 <target>
MTR: mtr --report --report-cycles 100 <target>
Dig for DNS propagation: dig +short @1.1.1.1 <hostname> A
Collect BGP data: query public collectors (e.g., bgpstream or RIPE RIS snapshots)

Postmortem publication & blameless culture

Publish the postmortem within an agreed SLA (48–72 hours for major incidents). Keep the tone blameless and focus on system fixes. Share the postmortem internally and with affected customers where appropriate.

What to include in the public postmortem

Plain-language summary of what happened
Customer impact and timeframe
Root cause summary and contributing factors
Remediation steps and status
Actions customers can take (e.g., update configs, expect credits)

Closing the loop: verification & compliance

After you implement actions, verify them with tests and audits. For regulated customers, include compliance evidence and update your SOC/ISO documentation where necessary.

Final checklist before closing the incident

All action items assigned and dated
Verification criteria met for critical mitigations
Postmortem published and distributed
Tabletop scheduled to validate new playbooks
Provider RCA received or follow-up open with timeline

Key takeaways

Prepare for provider failure: Assume providers will fail; build layers of independent monitoring and multi-homing.
Collect evidence early: Quick, consistent diagnostics make RCAs decisive and shorten resolution time.
Automate failover & validation: Regularly test and verify failover paths; automate rollbacks when safe.
Demand clear vendor RCAs: Track vendor commitments and incorporate their fixes into your risk model and contracts.

Where to go from here (next actions)

Immediately after closing an incident, schedule:

A 90-day verification window to track KPIs
A tabletop with the carrier/cloud provider to test escalation paths
An audit to validate runbook updates and automation

Use this postmortem template as a living document. Update it as new threats emerge—BGP security, edge orchestration failures, or provider-controlled software faults. In 2026, resilience is as much about procedural rigor and vendor governance as it is about code and hardware.

Call to action

Copy this template into your incident repository, run a tabletop this quarter, and schedule your provider tabletop. If you want a hands-on review, our team offers a free incident playbook audit to map your vendor dependencies and test failover automation. Contact us to book a 60-minute resilience review.

whites

Contributor

Senior editor and content strategist. Writing about technology, design, and the future of digital media. Follow along for deep dives into the industry's moving parts.