Postmortem: E-commerce Website Outage Caused by Database Misconfiguration (for documentation purposes only)

Issue Summary: On May 13, 2023, from 8:00 PM to 12:30 AM PST, our e-commerce website experienced a complete outage, which resulted in users being unable to access any pages on the website. All of our users were affected by this issue.

Timeline:

• 8:00 PM: The issue was detected when our support team received numerous complaints from customers about the website being down.

• 8:10 PM: Engineers started investigating the issue by checking the server logs, network configurations, and database queries to identify any recent changes that could have caused the issue.

• 8:15 PM: Initial assumption was that the issue was caused by a network outage or a server failure.

• 9:30 PM: Further investigations revealed that a recent update to the website's content management system had caused a misconfiguration in the database, resulting in a critical error.

• 9:35 PM: The incident was escalated to the senior engineering team and they started working on a fix.

• 9:50 PM: The team discovered that the misconfiguration had corrupted a critical database table, which needed to be repaired before the website could be restored.

• 10:15 PM: The team started repairing the database table, which took longer than expected due to its size and complexity.

• 12:30 AM: The database table was successfully repaired, and the website was restored to normal operation.

Root Cause and Resolution: The root cause of the issue was a misconfiguration in the database caused by a recent update to the content management system. This resulted in a critical error that brought down the entire website.

To resolve the issue, the team had to repair a corrupted database table, which required specialized tools and knowledge. Once the table was repaired, the website was restored to normal operation.

Corrective and Preventative Measures: To prevent similar issues from occurring in the future, the following corrective and preventative measures will be taken:

• Implement a more rigorous testing process for updates to the website's content management system to catch misconfigurations before they are pushed to production.

• Implement better monitoring capabilities to detect database errors and misconfigurations more quickly.

• Implement automated backups and database replication to reduce the impact of similar issues.

• Conduct a post-mortem analysis to identify any additional measures that can be taken to prevent similar issues from occurring in the future.

TODO:

• Review and improve testing process for updates to the website's content management system.

• Improve monitoring capabilities to detect database errors and misconfigurations more quickly.

• Implement automated backups and database replication to reduce the impact of similar issues.

• Conduct a post-mortem analysis to identify any additional measures that can be taken to prevent similar issues from occurring in the future.