Briefing
The storefront came back after stage 1, and the next page arrived within minutes: every call the storefront makes to its API fails.
During the release, API traffic was drained away and later failed back to a new VIP, and the networking team believes the failback itself worked.
Sam's first guess is DNS.
Static pages are fine, so customers can browse but cannot add to cart or pay.
Inspired by a real outage: Temporary hosts-file override left behind after a failback (FixOps composite of public postmortem patterns). Names and details are fictionalized.
The fix is yours to find: hints, the recovery checks and the debrief unlock inside the incident.