An emergency procedure handles urgent changes or operational situations without turning urgency into a loophole. A production outage may require a hotfix, but bypassing code review should remain exceptional. Make the procedure intentionally tedious: extra documentation, approvals, and explicit accountability discourage routine shortcuts. section 9.2.6
A robust emergency procedure defines:
- Authorized people for each process, with higher-risk actions requiring appropriate security, infrastructure, site reliability, or management involvement. section 10.2.2
- An invocation path using a ticket or form that records justification and rationale, followed by the required approval. section 10.2.2
- Decision trees, bypass mechanisms, immediate actions, communication, documentation, and postincident analysis. section 10.4
Production outage
When an outage causes lost revenue, an authorized person opens the emergency ticket, documents why normal code review cannot wait, obtains the required approval, executes the defined bypass, and completes communication and postincident follow-up. section 10.4 section 10.2.2
