Reliability · Flashcard

What is the role of the Incident Commander (IC) during an incident?

  • ATo hold overall coordination and decision-making authority, delegating tasks and keeping the response organised
  • BTo personally debug and fix the failing system while everyone else waits quietly for the outage to end
  • CTo write the customer-facing status page updates alone while no one coordinates the technical response
  • DTo approve the budget and hardware purchases needed before any mitigation work is allowed to start

Why this is the answer

The IC owns coordination: they hold the big picture, make and delegate decisions, and keep roles clear so the response does not fragment. They deliberately do not dive into hands-on debugging, which is the operations lead’s job, so they can stay above the details. Writing status updates is the communications lead’s role. And procuring budget or hardware is unrelated to running a live incident.

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