Stop Debugging and Start Mitigating.

• ↳When the database crashes during Black Friday, chaos erupts.
• ↳Ten engineers jump into Slack, all trying different fixes simultaneously, accidentally stepping on each other's toes.

↳To establish order, SREs use the Incident Command System (ICS) (adapted from firefighters):

• ↳The boss of the incident.
• ↳The IC's golden rule is *keep your hands off the keyboard*.
• ↳They don't look at logs.
• ↳They coordinate the SMEs, make the hard calls ('Drop 50% of traffic to save the cluster'), and ensure progress.
• ↳2. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs): The engineers executing the commands.
• ↳They report their findings to the IC.
• ↳3. Scribe: Documents every command run and exact timestamps.
• ↳Critical for the postmortem.
• ↳4. Communications Lead: Writes status page updates and emails executives so they stop bothering the IC.