Most teams obsess over how fast they fix incidents, but the biggest hidden delay usually happens before anyone even knows something is wrong. MTTD (mean time to detect) is the average time between the moment a failure actually begins and the moment your team discovers it. It is the first clock in the incident lifecycle, […]
Every engineering team eventually faces the same question during a chaotic outage: does this actually count as an incident? An incident is any unplanned event that disrupts a service, degrades its quality, or threatens its normal operation and requires a response to restore it. Getting this definition right is not academic. It determines when your […]
Learn what mean time to resolve (MTTR) is, how to calculate it with the MTTR formula, benchmark your performance against DORA tiers, and reduce incident recovery time.
In October 2021, Meta’s platforms went down for six hours. Engineers discovered the issue within minutes. What followed wasn’t silence from incompetence — it was silence from chaos: no clear communications lead, no pre-built templates, no defined update cadence. Speculation about a security breach spread worldwide. Regulatory scrutiny intensified. The outage cost an estimated $65 […]
Five engineers join a P1 channel. Three are checking the same dashboard. Two are deploying conflicting fixes. Nobody is talking to customers. Forty minutes in, the incident is worse than when it started — not because the team lacked skill, but because nobody was in command. This is what incidents look like without an incident […]
62% of site reliability engineers report weekly sleep disruption from night pages. That number comes from a survey of over 30,000 IT professionals — and it reveals the core tension in every SRE practice: the discipline exists to make systems reliable, but the humans running those systems are often anything but. Site reliability engineering (SRE) […]
