Postmortem Playbook: Investigating Multi-Service Outages (Cloudflare, AWS, X)

When Cloudflare, AWS and X all wobble at once: the problem you dread — and the playbook you need

Outages that cross CDN, cloud provider and social platforms are messy: telemetry gaps, confused stakeholders, and compliance risk. If your team depends on a third-party CDN for edge logic, AWS for core services, and a social platform for customer comms, a single event can cascade into a multi-domain outage that’s hard to investigate and harder to explain. This postmortem playbook gives SRE and security teams a checklist-driven runbook to collect the right telemetry, coordinate comms, preserve evidence, and produce an actionable post-incident review.

Why this matters in 2026

Late 2025 and early 2026 accelerated two trends that change how we investigate outages:

• Edge logic and serverless at the CDN layer are now business-critical. CDNs (not just as caches) run authentication, rate-limiting, and even transform payloads at the edge.
• Multi-provider dependency is the default. Organizations adopt multi-cloud/multi-CDN and rely on social platforms (e.g., X) for real-time support and outage signaling, making cross-platform failures more common and more complicated.

Example: the Jan 16, 2026 spike in outage reports affecting X, Cloudflare and AWS highlighted how fast impacts propagate across domains and channels. Use cases like these show why a repeatable postmortem and evidence-first runbook are essential.

Immediate triage checklist (first 15–30 minutes)

1. Declare incident & severity — Create an incident channel, assign an incident commander (IC) and a communications lead.
2. Capture scope quickly — Which services, regions, and user segments are affected? Pull initial dashboards and sequence a rolling update.
3. Collect live telemetry — Snapshot core telemetry sources (DNS, BGP, CDN, cloud control plane, API gateways, authentication).
4. Preserve evidence — Export logs (don’t truncate), take API/console screenshots, and lock the incident channel to read-only for key artifacts.
5. Communicate early — Post an external holding message (status page and social) and an internal briefing to stakeholders.

Telemetry collection: what to fetch now (detailed)

When multiple providers are involved, the challenge becomes correlating control-plane signals (status pages, provider APIs) with data-plane telemetry (edge logs, user errors). Below is a prioritized list of telemetry and example commands/queries you can run during the incident.

Critical telemetry matrix

• DNS — dig +trace, authoritative zone checks, TTLs. Example: dig +short NS yourdomain.com and dig +trace www.yourdomain.com.
• BGP / Routing — Check public BGP collectors and your transit/peering looking-glass for route changes. Query RouteViews or RIPE RIS and your ISP's looking-glass.
• CDN (Cloudflare) — Edge error rates, WAF events, edge script failures, and Logpush snapshots. If Logpush to S3 is configured, snapshot the latest objects; otherwise, use the Cloudflare API to pull analytics and firewall events.
• Cloud provider (AWS) — CloudWatch metrics, ELB/ALB logs, CloudTrail, Route 53 health checks, VPC flow logs, and autoscaling events. Use CloudWatch Logs Insights for quick queries.
• Identity & Auth — OIDC/SAML failures, token issuance errors, IAM policy changes, and downstream auth errors (401/403 spikes).
• Edge & App logs — Web server logs, API gateway logs, and application traces (distributed tracing spans, e.g., X-Ray, OpenTelemetry).
• Client-side signals — Real user monitoring (RUM) data, mobile crash reports, SDK error dashboards.
• Third-party platform status — Provider status pages (Cloudflare, AWS, X) and syslog/announcements. Archive the status page snapshot.

Example queries and commands (practical)

Use these during an incident to grab evidence fast.

• CloudWatch Logs Insights (to find 5xx spikes):

  fields @timestamp, @message
  | filter status >= 500
  | stats count() by bin(1m), status
  | sort @timestamp desc
  

• Pull recent CloudTrail activity for control-plane changes:

  aws cloudtrail lookup-events --lookup-attributes AttributeKey=EventName,AttributeValue=UpdateHostedZone

• Download Cloudflare Logpush objects from S3 (example):

  aws s3 cp s3://my-cloudflare-logpush-bucket/2026-01-16/ ./logs/ --recursive --profile incident

• DNS timed traces and resolve checks:

  dig +short @1.1.1.1 www.yourdomain.com
  traceroute -n 1.1.1.1
  

• Simple HTTP health check from multiple vantage points (curl + time):

  curl -sS -w "{\"http_code\":%{http_code},\"time_total\":%{time_total}}\n" -o /dev/null https://www.yourdomain.com

Evidence preservation & chain-of-custody

In multi-provider outages it's easy to lose the golden record. Your postmortem will only be credible if your evidence is reproducible.

• Export immutable copies — Push log snapshots to a dedicated, access-controlled S3/GCS bucket with immutable versioning where possible.
• Timestamp and tag — Record all collection commands and timestamps in the incident log; use cryptographic checksums (sha256) for exported files.
• Preserve provider state — Archive screenshots of provider status pages, incident IDs, and any public announcements. Use a short-lived signed URL if needed for sharing with external auditors.

Stakeholder communication runbook

Clarity, cadence and ownership reduce churn. Use a role-based communications matrix so teams and executives get just enough information.

Who says what (example roles)

• Incident Commander (IC) — Owns incident scope, severity, and closure.
• Communications Lead — Drafts external status page messages, social updates, and press responses.
• Technical Lead — Coordinates telemetry collection and mitigation steps.
• Legal/Compliance — Determines regulatory notification obligations (GDPR, sector regulators) and data breach thresholds.
• Customer Success / Support — Pushes templated responses to customers and aggregates support tickets.

Message templates (short & practical)

Initial external holding message: We're aware of reports of degraded service for [service]. We're investigating and will provide updates every 30 minutes. No action required from customers at this time.

Internal status update (IC -> execs): Incident declared at 10:38 UTC. Impact: 40% of API requests returning 503 across us-east-1 and CDN edge. Next update in 20 mins. IC: @alice, Tech lead: @bob.

Root cause analysis: structured approach

Use an evidence-first, hypothesis-driven method that ties directly to telemetry and the timeline.

1. Reconstruct a minute-by-minute timeline from the earliest user reports to resolution; include provider status changes and control-plane events.
2. List correlated events — e.g., Cloudflare edge errors spike aligned with a Route 53 configuration change or an AWS regional API error.
3. Run hypothesis tests — change rollback, replay requests into a staging mirror, or replay traces to see breakpoints.
4. Use multiple RCA techniques — 5 Whys for narrative clarity, fault-tree for technical causation, and impact trees for business decisions.
5. Document unknowns — explicitly note what you couldn't establish and why.

RCA evidence checklist

• Timeline with at least second-level resolution
• Log snapshots and clipping points
• Provider incident IDs and URLs
• Configuration diffs (DNS, CDN rules, IaC commits)
• Testing artifacts (replays, canary results)

Postmortem template (use this verbatim in your reports)

Use a consistent template so readers know where to find impact, remediation and follow-ups.

1. Title & incident number
2. Summary (TL;DR) — 2–3 sentences: what happened, who was impacted, and current status.
3. Severity & timeline — declaration & closure times, MTTD, MTTR.
4. Impact — user segments, regions, customers affected, metrics (error rates, revenue impact if known).
5. Root cause — evidence-backed statements and the causal chain.
6. Mitigations taken — immediate and short-term fixes applied during the incident.
7. Long-term fixes — code, configuration, process changes and owners with deadlines.
8. Lessons learned — technical and organizational takeaways.
9. Appendices — raw logs, commands used, artifacts, and a list of people involved.

Hardening & remediation playbook for multi-service outages

Investments that pay off in cross-provider incidents:

• Multi-CDN with deterministic failover — not a passive fallback: orchestrated DNS or BGP-level failover and pre-warmed origins on the secondary CDN.
• Control-plane monitoring — monitor provider status pages and APIs and correlate with your data-plane metrics.
• Degrade gracefully — design features so non-critical functionality can fail while critical systems remain accessible.
• Separation of channels — keep at least one out-of-band communications channel (email list, pager, independent SMS/voice) that does not rely on the affected platforms.
• Feature flags & circuit breakers — enable fast rollback of edge logic and limit blast radius.
• Proactive runbook testing — run game days that simulate combined CDN/AWS/social outages.

Case study: a reconstructed scenario (inspired by Jan 16, 2026)

On Jan 16, 2026 multiple sites and services reported issues across a CDN, cloud provider, and social platform. The useful lessons:

• Don’t assume the provider status story is the whole story — downstream routing or misconfigurations often coexist with provider-side incidents.
• External signal channels can be unreliable — teams should not rely solely on one social platform for customer notifications.
• Short-term mitigations that succeeded included switching DNS to a pre-configured failover, and issuing a global rate-limit override at the CDN for authenticated endpoints.

KPIs to track post-incident

• MTTD (Mean Time to Detect) — how long between first user impact and detection.
• MTTR (Mean Time to Restore) — time to full functional restoration.
• Number of customer contacts and average time to first response.
• Action completion rate — % of postmortem actions closed on time.
• SLO/SLA breaches and financial impact — metric-linked business impact.

Regulatory and compliance notes

When incidents cross systems that may contain personal data, involve legal/compliance early. GDPR, sectoral regulators, and internal policies often have notification windows. Keep a clear record of what data was in scope and when the exposure was discovered.

Operationalizing the playbook

Turn this playbook into operational assets:

• Embed the checklist as a runbook in your incident management tool (PagerDuty, OpsGenie, or internal platform).
• Create a single-click evidence-collection script (that runs authenticated aws/cli and provider APIs) and stores outputs to an immutable bucket.
• Run quarterly exercises that simulate cross-provider failures, and treat the lessons as continuous improvement items.

Actionable takeaways

• Always start with a short, time-stamped timeline and preserve raw logs — your RCA can’t outpace missing evidence.
• Map telemetry to responsibility — know which team owns CDN rules, who can rotate DNS, and who contacts providers.
• Keep communications simple and role-based: internal updates for action, external holding messages for customers.
• Prepare irreversible artifacts: immutable log snapshots and signed checksums reduce dispute risk during audits.
• Plan for multi-provider drills at least twice a year and automate evidence collection that runs on incident start.

Final checklist (ready to paste into your incident channel)

1. Declare incident & create channel — tag IC, comms lead, legal.
2. Snapshot: Cloudflare logs, CloudWatch/ELB logs, CloudTrail, Route 53, DNS dig outputs, BGP collector data.
3. Take provider status page screenshots and archive URLs.
4. Post initial external holding message and internal executive update.
5. Run triage hypothesis tests (rollback/disable suspect edge rule, switch DNS/failover CDN).
6. After recovery: produce postmortem using template, assign actions, and schedule retro.

Call to action

Use this playbook to standardize your cross-provider incident response. Download our incident-ready postmortem template (RCA + evidence checklist + comms scripts) and run a tabletop this quarter. If you want a reviewed runbook or an automated evidence-collection script tailored to your stack (Cloudflare + AWS + social integrations), contact our team to schedule a runbook audit.

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