Cloud Outage Postmortem Template for Micro App Providers

When your micro app goes dark: a ready-to-use postmortem and runbook for Cloudflare/AWS/X outages

Hook: You ship micro apps to dozens or thousands of sites, depend on third-party infrastructure, and a Cloudflare/AWS/X outage suddenly takes your feature—or whole product—offline. You need a repeatable, fast incident workflow, crystal-clear communications, and an airtight postmortem that protects your SLAs and your reputation. This guide gives you both: a production-ready postmortem template and an operational runbook tailored for micro app providers in 2026.

Top-line advice (read first)

Most outages you’ll face as a micro app provider in 2026 are third-party-dependent: CDNs (Cloudflare), cloud regions (AWS), or platform outages (X). The fastest way to reduce impact is to (1) detect quickly, (2) communicate early and clearly to integrators, and (3) execute a pre-tested fallback/rollback that minimizes end-user disruption. Below you'll find:

• A ready-to-copy postmortem template built for micro apps
• A step-by-step incident runbook for Cloudflare and AWS-style outages
• Communication snippets for status pages, customers, and legal/SLA teams
• SLA and SLO guidance that reflects 2026 trends (multi-CDN, distributed edge, ephemeral micro apps)

Why this matters in 2026

Late 2025 and early 2026 saw a noticeable spike in high-profile provider incidents—Cloudflare, AWS, and X outages drove many dependent services offline and highlighted fragility in single-provider architectures. For micro app providers—often small teams with large distribution surfaces—the cost of an outage is amplified because you serve many embed points and rely on the host platform’s stability. The right runbook and postmortem process transform outages from reputational disasters into learning opportunities.

Quick glossary

• Micro app: a small, embeddable web experience or widget distributed to customers or included in partner sites.
• Runbook: step-by-step operational guide for responding to incidents. See our hybrid edge orchestration playbook for multi-edge tactics.
• Postmortem: incident report that documents what happened, why, and how recurrence will be prevented.
• SLA / SLO / SLI: service-level agreement/objective/indicator. SLAs are contractual; SLOs and SLIs are engineering measures.

Severity matrix for micro app incidents

Use a clear severity matrix so your on-call and comms teams know the response tempo:

• Severity 1 (S1) – Global outage preventing >30% of active users or >10 paying customers from using the micro app. Immediate 24x7 response.
• Severity 2 (S2) – Partial outage/verifiable degradation (10–30% users), degraded core functionality, major performance regressions.
• Severity 3 (S3) – Single-region issues, non-core features broken, or degraded background jobs with minimal user impact.
• Severity 4 (S4) – Cosmetic issues, logs-only alerts, or maintenance windows.

Incident runbook: immediate steps (first 30 minutes)

When you detect an outage (monitoring alert, customer report, or vendor status page), follow these prioritized actions to stabilize and gather facts:

1. Detect & Triage (0–5 mins)
   • Confirm alerts across multiple systems (error rates, latency, synthetic checks).
   • Check vendor status pages: Cloudflare, AWS Health Dashboard, X/Twitter developer status (early 2026 outages often reported first via these pages).
   • Classify severity using the matrix above; call the S1/major incident channel if required.
2. Notify & Coordinate (5–10 mins)
   • Open an incident channel (Slack/Discord/MS Teams) with stakeholders: on-call, engineering lead, product, support, and comms.
   • Post a one-line status to your status page and internal channel: what you know, impact, and ETA for the next update.
3. Mitigate (10–30 mins)
   • Execute pre-approved mitigations from the runbook (see next section). If it's a Cloudflare outage, be prepared to bypass the proxy and point traffic to origin IPs if DNS TTL allows.
   • If unable to mitigate quickly, prepare a customer-facing message explaining impact and next steps.

Runbook actions: Cloudflare outage scenarios

Cloudflare can affect proxies, CDN, WAF, and DNS. Tailor these steps to what your micro app uses.

1. Assess whether Cloudflare is the failure point
   • Verify whether your origin is reachable directly: curl your origin IP or origin DNS (not the proxied host).
   • Check Cloudflare status and Twitter/Reddit for global reports (late 2025/early 2026 incidents spike in public channels).
2. Quick bypass (if Cloudflare proxy is down)
   • If you prepared a low DNS TTL and an origin IP, update DNS records to point to origin IPs/bypass Cloudflare. Use Route53 or your DNS provider's API for a fast change.
   • Example AWS CLI snippet to upsert an A record (replace placeholders):

     aws route53 change-resource-record-sets --hosted-zone-id Z123456 --change-batch '{
       "Changes": [{
         "Action": "UPSERT",
         "ResourceRecordSet": {
           "Name": "widget.example.com.",
           "Type": "A",
           "TTL": 60,
           "ResourceRecords": [{"Value": "203.0.113.7"}]
         }
       ]
     }'

   • Note: This only works if the origin serves correct Host headers and TLS (use a cert for the origin or use a secondary domain).
3. Disable advanced features
   • Turn off WAF rules, bot protection, or Workers if they introduce failures. Have a safe rollback toggle in Cloudflare UI/API.
4. Post-mitigation checks
   • Run synthetic checks from multiple regions to validate reachability.
   • Update status page with mitigation steps and ETA.

Runbook actions: AWS outage scenarios

AWS outages are typically regional; planned multi-region designs reduce impact. If you don’t have multi-region ready, these steps maximize availability quickly.

1. Identify affected services
   • Check AWS Health Dashboard and CloudWatch metrics for S3, ELB, API Gateway, or EC2 anomalies. For guidance on operating with AWS European and sovereign regions, refer to hybrid AWS patterns like Hybrid Sovereign Cloud Architecture.
2. Failover to secondary region
   • If you configured cross-region replication and a standby stack, shift traffic using Route53 weighted/failover routing or update ALIAS records.

     aws route53 change-resource-record-sets --hosted-zone-id Z123456 --change-batch '{
       "Changes": [{
         "Action": "UPSERT",
         "ResourceRecordSet": {
           "Name": "api.example.com.",
           "Type": "CNAME",
           "TTL": 60,
           "ResourceRecords": [{"Value": "staging-api.example.com."}]
         }
       ]
     }'

3. Service-specific fallbacks
   • S3: enable cross-region replication and serve static assets from CDN cache; configure a cached Origin Shield.
   • RDS: promote a read-replica in another region if you maintain replication preconfigured.
4. Temporary degradations
   • Disable non-critical features (analytics, personalization) to reduce load on degraded services.

Rollback patterns for micro app providers

Micro apps are often small frontend bundles and a few serverless endpoints. Have these rollback mechanics ready:

• Static bundle fallback: Serve a versioned static bundle from a multi-region S3 bucket or an alternative CDN (multi-CDN). Deploy an older working build as a hotfix and update your manifest/CNAME to point to it.
• Feature flags: Keep kill-switches for risky features. Toggle them by API so you can rollback without deploy. See governance ideas for versioning and feature controls: Versioning Prompts and Models.
• DNS/Proxy swap: Flip traffic to a backup origin or unproxied origin if the CDN is the failure domain.
• CI/CD rollback: Have a documented, single-command rollback in CI (e.g., a Git tag-based redeploy) to restore last-known-good quickly.

Communications: what to say, and when

Clear, honest, and regular communication reduces customer anxiety. Follow the cadence: immediate acknowledgement, rolling updates, and a final postmortem.

Minute 0–30: First public notice (status page + support)

“We’re investigating reports of degraded performance/availability for [widget.example.com]. We’re working on mitigation and will update at [time]. Impact: unknown. Affected customers: potentially all.”

Ongoing updates (every 15–30 minutes for S1)

“Update: Root cause appears related to [Cloudflare/AWS] in [region]. Mitigations in progress: [bypassing proxy / failing over]. Estimated resolution: [time].”

Final post-incident message

“Resolved: Service restored at [time]. Impact: [summary]. Root cause: [brief]. Next steps: [deployments, configuration changes, timeframe for fixes]. Full postmortem will be published by [date/time].”

Postmortem template (copyable)

Use this as your canonical incident document—publish internally and trim to publish externally when appropriate.

Title: [Short summary and incident ID]
Severity: [S1/S2/...]
Start time: [UTC timestamp]
Detect time: [UTC timestamp]
Resolved time: [UTC timestamp]
Duration: [total downtime]

Summary:
- One-paragraph summary of impact and root cause

Impact:
- Affected customers: [number/IDs]
- Features affected: [list]
- Business impact: [revenue/SLAs/customers]

Timeline (concise):
- [T+0] Detection: [how detected]
- [T+5] Triage: [actions]
- [T+15] Mitigation: [actions]
- [T+X] Resolution: [actions]

Root cause:
- Detailed technical explanation
- Which vendor(s) were implicated

Detection & Response:
- What monitoring detected the issue
- What ran well/poorly in response
- Gaps in runbook or tooling

Remediation & Mitigation:
- Immediate remediation taken during incident
- Permanent fixes planned

SLA impact and credits:
- Which SLAs were impacted (service, uptime, response time)
- Estimated credits or contractual impacts

Action items (owner + due date):
- [Action 1] - owner - due
- [Action 2] - owner - due

Lessons learned:
- Short list of engineering and process changes

Appendices:
- Raw logs and metrics snippets
- Vendor status links
- Communication artifacts (emails/status updates)

SLA considerations for micro app providers (practical rules)

Micro app providers often sell to SMBs or integrators; SLAs should be realistic and reflect your control over dependencies.

• Define responsibility boundaries: Explicitly state which components are vendor-dependent (CDN, DNS, platform). Example clause: “Provider is not responsible for downtime caused by third-party edge providers if no feasible failover was configured by customer.”
• Offer optional SLA tiers: Basic (best-effort), Business (SLA with multi-CDN/DR plan), Enterprise (custom DR contracts). Charge for guaranteed multi-region capacity and active-active failover.
• SLOs & SLIs: Measure availability at the integration edge (widget load success rate), not just origin health. Track 30-day rolling SLOs and publish monthly reports for paid tiers.
• Credits and exemptions: Specify vendor outage exemptions and maintenance windows. Define the credit calculation explicitly (e.g., % downtime x monthly fee).

Preventive investments that pay off

Invest in the following to reduce incident scope and mean time to recovery (MTTR):

• Multi-CDN + intelligent routing: Use Fastly/Cloudflare/Akamai or DNS-level multi-CDN orchestration for critical assets. See multi-CDN cost and routing tradeoffs in Edge‑Oriented Cost Optimization.
• Feature flags & quick toggles: Kill switches reduce rollback time immensely. Governance and prompt/versioning ideas: Versioning Prompts and Models.
• Low TTL DNS & automation playbooks: Keep tested scripts to change DNS records via API during emergencies. See cache and TTL testing advice at Testing for Cache‑Induced SEO Mistakes.
• Synthetic monitoring from multiple vantage points: Detect provider-region failures fast.
• Runbook rehearsals: Practice the failure scenarios quarterly, and refine the runbook. Rehearsal patterns and playbooks are discussed in hybrid edge and small-team guides like Hybrid Micro‑Studio Playbook.

A short real-world scenario (pattern: Cloudflare DNS outage)

Context: A micro app provider embedded in 2,000 client sites relies on Cloudflare for DNS and CDN. On Jan 16, 2026, public reports spiked about Cloudflare outages—clients reported widget 502s and blank content.

Response highlights:

• Detection: Synthetic checks and customer tickets confirmed error rates rose to 65% within 7 minutes.
• Mitigation: Team updated Route53 records to point to origin IPs (prepared beforehand with documented origin certs) and toggled feature flags to reduce origin load.
• Communication: Provider posted hourly status updates and sent targeted emails to paying customers with integration tips.
• Result: Service restored to ~85% of customers within 45 minutes; full recovery took 3 hours as DNS propagated to older TTL caches.
• Postmortem: Documented lack of pre-approved DNS change automation; action item created to implement a one-click failover via IaC and improve SLA tiering.

Checklist: incident close and postmortem publication

• Confirm service stability for X hours (X depends on severity)
• Complete the postmortem template & assign action owners
• Publish redacted external postmortem for customers (remove sensitive logs)
• Update runbook with what failed and what worked
• Schedule a follow-up review to verify action items

Advanced strategies and 2026 trends to adopt now

Adopt these advanced strategies to reduce reliance on single providers and fit 2026’s operating reality:

• Edge compute diversification: Run critical micro app code in multiple edge providers—combine Cloudflare Workers with Node edge functions on other CDNs. See hybrid edge orchestration patterns: Hybrid Edge Orchestration.
• AI-assisted incident triage: Use LLM-driven runbook assistants to suggest next steps, but keep human approval for rollbacks. Practical LLM upskilling: From Prompt to Publish: Gemini Guided Learning.
• Observability contracts: Include visibility guarantees (metrics/trace access) in enterprise contracts so you can debug third-party issues faster. Related architecture patterns: Hybrid Sovereign Cloud Architecture.
• Productized failovers: Offer customers an add-on that guarantees multi-region/CDN failover for an additional fee—turn reliability into a revenue stream.

Final takeaways

• Prepare: Pre-approve DNS/CI/CD rollback scripts and test them. Low-lift rehearsals save hours.
• Communicate: Customers forgive outages if you communicate early, often, and transparently.
• Contract: Make SLAs explicit about third-party dependencies and offer tiers that reflect your operational guarantees.
• Learn: Publish postmortems that focus on corrective action, not blame. See broader postmortem templates at Postmortem Templates.

Call to action

If you want a packaged incident kit: download our Git repo with a ready-made runbook, Route53/Cloudflare automation snippets, and a publishable postmortem template tailored for micro app providers. Or, book a 30-minute consult to walk through your architecture and map a practical multi-CDN and SLA strategy for 2026. Click to get the kit and secure your micro apps before the next outage.

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