incident-responseapidevops

Emergency Response Playbook for Developers When a Major Cloud Provider Goes Down

ffilevault

2026-02-01

10 min read

Developer emergency playbook: ready-to-use feature flags, circuit breakers, retries, and client templates for cloud provider outages affecting scanning and signing APIs.

When a major cloud provider goes dark: a practical emergency response playbook for developers (2026)

Hook: You support scanning and signing APIs used in production, and at 09:17 your monitoring dashboard spikes: 500s, TLS errors, and a flood of customer support tickets. Whether it's Cloudflare, AWS, or another infra provider, outages in 2026 still break critical document workflows. This playbook gives developer-grade, step-by-step response templates, feature-flag recipes, circuit breaker settings, retry policies, and client-facing communications you can copy & paste and use immediately.

Why this matters now (2026 context)

Late 2025 and early 2026 showed a renewed pattern: centralized control-plane incidents, edge network failures, and supply-chain impacts that cascade into document processing — especially scanning (OCR pipelines) and signing (HSM-backed e-signatures). Adoption of OpenTelemetry, AIOps, and client-side signing soared in 2024–2026 because teams realized single-provider outages still happen. This playbook assumes you want resilient, compliant behavior without sacrificing security or trust.

Principle: When infrastructure degrades, favor secure, predictable degradation over fragile availability. Your goal is clear communication, preserved security posture, and measurable SLAs.

Top-level emergency runbook (developer checklist)

Use this runbook as the canonical incident checklist for outages that affect scanning or signing APIs. Keep it pinned in Slack/Teams and in your on-call rotation.

Triage & detect — Confirm provider status (status pages), cross-check synthetic tests, check DNS/CDN, and validate error signatures (e.g., Cloudflare 5xx patterns, AWS ELB timeouts).
Isolate — Identify affected components (OCR workers, signing service, KMS/HSM). Switch non-critical traffic away using feature flag control planes or routing rules.
Contain — Flip feature flags and enable circuit breakers to stop cascading failures.
Mitigate — Apply fallbacks (local signing, queued processing, degraded OCR), update retries and throttles, relieve back-pressure.
Communicate — Publish status page updates and a templated customer message. Keep updates regular.
Recover — Gradually roll traffic back with canaries and synthetic checks.
Post-incident — Run a blameless postmortem, update runbooks, and track SLA credits and legal notifications if required.

Quick detection checklist (first 5 minutes)

Check provider status pages and public incident trackers.
Confirm via synthetic HTTP probes and tracing (OpenTelemetry traces showing carrier-level failures).
Search logs for signature patterns: spikes in TLS handshake failures, 502/503/504 rates, HTTP timeouts.
Route a test request through alternative DNS/CDN if available to validate scope.

Feature-flag strategies that save the day

Feature flags are your emergency kill-switch and migration tool. In 2026, most teams run feature flag control planes that can be toggled programmatically (LaunchDarkly, Flagsmith, or internal). Below are flag strategies tailored to scanning and signing.

Recommended flags

scanning.mode: values = live | queued | fallback. Switch to queued for persistent provider errors.
signing.mode: values = remote | local-hsm | reject. Never auto-disable signing — prefer local secure fallback if allowed by policy.
auth.token.refresh: values = auto | manual. Pause auto-refresh flows if KMS API calls are failing.
cdn.fallback: boolean. Route assets via backup CDN or direct origin.
degraded.ui: boolean. Toggle in-app banners that explain degraded functionality to users.

Practical toggle patterns

Keep these patterns in code and ops runbooks:

Degrade First, Fail Safe: switch scanning.mode to queued to accept the upload and process later. This prevents user churn and avoids exposing half-processed documents.
Local-sign as fallback: if signing.mode supports local-hsm, use client-side or edge HSM to produce signatures. Ensure private keys never leave approved hardware modules.
Reject with grace: if local signing violates policy, set signing.mode to reject and return a clear, actionable error with a timeline (see client templates).

Feature flag snippet (pseudocode)

<!-- Pseudocode: flag-driven processing -->
if (featureFlags.get('scanning.mode') == 'live') {
  processScanLive(request)
} else if (featureFlags.get('scanning.mode') == 'queued') {
  enqueueForLater(request)
  respondWith(202, { message: 'Your document was accepted and will be processed.' })
} else {
  respondWith(503, { message: 'Scanning temporarily unavailable.' })
}

Circuit breaker & retry patterns for API degradation

When a downstream provider starts responding slowly or with errors, circuits must open to protect your system. Use conservative thresholds and exponential backoff with jitter. In 2026, popular libraries (resilience4j, Polly) integrate with observability tools — surface these events in your dashboards.

Baseline circuit breaker configuration (suggested)

Failure threshold: 5 failures in 30 seconds
Open timeout: 60 seconds
Half-open probe: 1 request every 10 seconds
Retry policy: exponential backoff starting at 200ms, max 8s, with full jitter
Max concurrent requests to provider: 10 per worker thread

Retry policy example (pseudocode)

// Example: retry with full jitter
function retryWithJitter(fn, attempts=5, baseMs=200) {
  for (i = 0; i < attempts; i++) {
    try { return await fn() }
    catch (err) {
      if (isFatal(err)) throw err
      sleep(random(0, Math.min(baseMs * 2**i, 8000)))
    }
  }
  throw new Error('Retries exhausted')
}

Specific patterns for scanning and signing APIs

Scanning (OCR) pipelines — safe degradation

Queue and notify: accept uploads and return a 202 with expected processed-at timestamp. Use an ordered work queue (FIFO) and persist metadata to your DB to avoid replays.
Fallback OCR: lower-accuracy, self-hosted OCR model at edge as fallback. Use it for text extraction when high-accuracy cloud OCR is unavailable.
Partial processing: process tag and metadata extraction locally; mark full OCR as pending.
Security: ensure queued documents are encrypted at rest with keys not dependent on failed provider.

Signing APIs — preserve cryptographic guarantees

Signing needs special treatment. Do not weaken cryptographic guarantees to preserve availability. Instead, provide controlled alternatives:

Local HSM fallback: Pre-provision secondary HSM keys or customer-managed keys that can be used when primary KMS is down.
Deferred signing: Allow clients to upload signing requests and get a signed receipt when the system recovers (clear SLA and client consent needed).
Policy enforcement: If policy forbids offline signing, fail-fast with an explicit error and offer timeline/compensation. Consider encoding fallback rules with policy-as-code so decisions are auditable.

Observability: what to monitor and alert on

In 2026, observability is table stakes. Your monitors must show degradation early and correlate it to provider incidents.

Key SLIs & metrics

Error rate (5xx) per endpoint — alert at 1% sustained increase over baseline.
Latency p50/p95/p99 for scanning and signing endpoints.
Queue growth and time-to-process for queued scans/signs.
Circuit breaker state (open/closed) and number of tripped breakers.
Provider-specific errors (DNS, TLS handshake, 502 patterns) correlated with downstream traces.

Tracing & logs

Instrument everything with OpenTelemetry. Trace a document from upload to OCR to signing. When a provider fails, traces should show where time is spent. Maintain structured logs with request IDs so customer service can reference specific transactions.

Client-facing communication templates (copy-paste)

Clear, consistent communication reduces churn. Use brief updates with status, user impact, mitigation, and an ETA. Update frequently — at least at 15min, 1hr, and on resolution. Below are ready-to-use templates.

We are currently experiencing degraded service for document scanning and/or signing due to a third-party infrastructure outage. Some uploads or signatures may be delayed or return errors. Our team is actively mitigating. We will provide another update within 30 minutes.

Status update — 60 minutes

Update: The outage affecting scanning and signing persists. We have enabled queued processing and limited local signing for compliant customers. New uploads will be accepted and processed in FIFO order. Estimated time to recover: unknown. We will continue to provide updates every hour. If you need urgent assistance, contact support (link).

Resolution message

Resolved: The degraded service has been resolved and normal processing has resumed. If your document was queued, you should see it processed within X minutes. We are investigating root cause and will publish a post-incident report within N days. We apologize for the disruption and will contact anyone affected by SLA credits or compliance concerns.

Customer support response snippet

Thank you for reporting this. We are aware of the incident affecting scanning/signing APIs caused by a third-party provider outage. We've queued your upload and will email you when processing completes. If you require immediate signing, please let us know and we will evaluate an approved manual process.

Legal, compliance, and SLA steps

Document every action and timeline — timestamps are essential for SLA calculations.
If your service processes regulated documents (eIDAS, HIPAA, GDPR), consult your DPO and legal team before enabling any fallback that could change data locality or control.
Prepare customer notifications for SLA or legal breach as required by contract.

Case study (composite, 2025 learning)

In late 2025 a fintech platform faced multi-region edge CDN failures that impacted OCR preprocessing and HSM access. Their response that reduced downtime impact included:

Immediate toggle to queued processing via feature flag (reduced customer-visible failures by 70%).
Activation of pre-provisioned local signing keys for VIP customers (used for 3% of traffic) while preserving audit logs and key custodian policies.
Automated rollback of rate limits and gradual re-onboarding with synthetic tests for 15 minutes before the full release.

Key takeaway: pre-authorized fallback modes and proactive communication reduced legal exposure and improved customer trust.

Automation & AIOps: next-level mitigations

By 2026, many teams use AIOps to detect and act on provider degradations. Examples of safe automation:

Auto-toggle feature flag to queued when 5xx > 2% for 30s and circuit breaks trip.
AI-suggested root causes surfaced to on-call engineer with ranked hypotheses (DNS vs. provider control plane vs. auth failure).
Automated customer messaging drafts prepared for human review, with variables filled by the incident context.

Post-incident checklist

Collect all logs, traces, and feature flag changes; preserve them for the postmortem.
Execute a blameless postmortem: timeline, impact, root cause, remediation, and owners for action items.
Update runbooks and feature flag safeguards (e.g., require two-person review for production toggles that change signing.mode).
Review contractual SLA impact and prepare customer communications about credits or remediation.
Run chaos experiments to validate fallbacks once stability is restored.

Developer templates: quick copy-paste

Runbook checklist (short)

1) Verify: provider status + synthetic probes
2) Set scanning.mode = queued
3) Set degraded.ui = true
4) Open incident channel & notify support
5) Enable circuit breakers and throttle
6) Monitor queue length & processing rate
7) Send hourly customer updates
8) Postmortem within 72 hours

Feature flag guardrails

- Require approval for toggling signing.mode to local-hsm
- Auto-revert scanning.mode from queued to live only after X successful canary runs
- Audit logs for all flag changes with operator id

Advanced strategies (architecture & prevention)

Multi-provider architecture: Use multi-OCR backends and multi-HSM/KMS strategies. Keep provider-specific clients decoupled and behind an adapter layer.
Edge capabilities: Deploy lightweight OCR or signing agents at the edge (edge-first / WASM workers) for minimal capability during central outage.
Policy-as-code: Encode fallback rules so they can be evaluated automatically with provable constraints (privacy, residency, audit).
Regular chaos testing: Simulate provider outages monthly and verify that feature flags, queues, and HSM fallbacks work.

Final actionable takeaways

Prepare feature flags and guardrails that let you switch to queued or local modes instantly.
Implement conservative circuit breakers and retry-with-jitter policies to stop cascading failures.
Design degraded but secure fallbacks for scanning and signing — never weaken cryptographic guarantees without consent.
Automate observability (OpenTelemetry), synthetic checks, and AIOps rules to detect provider problems earlier.
Keep clear, frequent customer-facing templates ready and follow a rigorous post-incident process.

Call to action

If you maintain scanning or signing APIs, take five minutes now: review your feature flags for scanning.mode and signing.mode, and ensure there’s a tested queued path and a documented local-signing fallback. For teams using FileVault Cloud tools, schedule a 30-minute resilience review with your engineering lead and update your on-call runbook based on this playbook.

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