On 24th of May 2023, Flavourful experienced a critical outage that affected our main database and website servers. This outage lasted for approximately 24 hours, resulting in a significant disruption of services for our users. We immediately contacted the hosting team as soon as the issue was detected and worked diligently to resolve the issue. This postmortem aims to provide a detailed analysis of the incident, identify the root cause, and outline the steps taken to mitigate similar issues in the future.

Incident Timeline:

• The outage was first detected when users reported an inability to access the Flavourfuls website and experienced errors during their interactions.
• The technical team was promptly notified about the issue and initiated an investigation.
• The hosting team was immediately contacted to investigate the server-side components.
• The hosting team confirmed that there was an issue with the main database and website servers.
• Our technical team engaged in collaboration with the hosting team to troubleshoot and identify the root cause.
• The root cause was identified, and steps were taken to restore the services.
• Services were gradually restored, and full functionality was regained after 24 hours.

Root Cause Analysis:
The outage was caused by a failure in the main database server. Upon investigation, it was discovered that a critical software update had inadvertently introduced an incompatibility issue with the database system. This compatibility issue led to a cascading failure, affecting the website servers as well.

Mitigation and Resolution:
To resolve the issue, the following steps were taken:

1. Immediate action: The hosting team was contacted as soon as the issue was detected, and they began investigating the root cause.
2. Troubleshooting: The technical team collaborated closely with the hosting team to identify the root cause. They thoroughly analyzed the system logs, database configurations, and recent software updates.
3. Rollback: Once the root cause was identified, a decision was made to roll back the recent software update to restore compatibility with the main database server.
4. Restoration: After rolling back the update, the hosting team worked diligently to restore the database and website servers to their normal operational state.
5. Testing and validation: Following the restoration, extensive testing was performed to ensure that all systems were functioning correctly and that the issue had been completely resolved.
6. Preventive measures: To mitigate similar incidents in the future, a post-incident review meeting was scheduled to discuss lessons learned and implement additional safeguards. This includes improving the testing and validation processes for software updates and enhancing monitoring capabilities to quickly detect and respond to compatibility issues.

Lessons Learned:

1. Robust monitoring: Enhance monitoring capabilities to proactively detect anomalies and potential compatibility issues within critical components.
2. Testing and validation: Strengthen the testing and validation processes for software updates, ensuring compatibility with the existing infrastructure before deployment.
3. Incident response: Review and improve the incident response procedures, including communication channels and escalation protocols, to minimize downtime and improve resolution time.
4. Documentation: Maintain up-to-date documentation of the system architecture, dependencies, and configurations to facilitate troubleshooting and faster resolution during critical incidents.

Conclusion:
Flavourful’s critical outage was a result of a compatibility issue caused by a recent software update, impacting the main database and website servers. The incident was promptly addressed, and services were fully restored within 24 hours. We apologize for the significant disruption caused to our users.