Incident retro - stories and home page down
Incident from: 2021-03-02
Incident till: 2021-03-02
Retro held: 2021-03-03
Timeline
2 March 2021
See https://wellcome.slack.com/archives/C3TQSF63C/p1614686143200300 https://wellcome.slack.com/archives/C01FBFSDLUA/p1614686253045200
11.55 updown alerts for: Front End Homepage Front End Stories Front End Articles
12.00 NP can still see home page; JP cannot
12.00 AC confirms they can’t get to https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/Wcj2kSgAAB-3C4Uj not available (I think this is the same URL as checked by Updown)
12.01 AC can get to some stories but not others
12.03 AC suggests rolling back to the release from 11:20
12.03 JP: I don’t really understand enough about the wc.org architecture to know but I guess the issue is with the content app
12.05 AC: notably, CI is failing for the latest commit https://buildkite.com/wellcomecollection/experience/builds/1963
12.05 JP restarted the content app
12.07 agreed on rollback
12.08 AC We are rolling back to 5762fe6e-a3b1-40b1-bf51-c399cd2df35c
12.12 deployment done but not back up
12.22 RK, AC, JP, GE, DMc, AN voice called in Slack
12.30 DMc (in #wc-experience) There was a typo in ‘contibutor’ which Prismic was erroring with. Updating this on prismic.io now (but so far doesn’t appear to have solved the problem)
Discussion about changing the model or the code
12.52 Updown still down alerts Front End Homepage Front End Stories Front End Articles
12.56 Where we’re at - contibutor has made its way into the Prismic schema and we’re going to stick with it for now to get a fix That means updating the graph query to use that spelling and keeping the Schema in the Prismic JSON editor that way too Use ‘contibutor’ typo in graph query - https://github.com/wellcomecollection/wellcomecollection.org/pull/6164
1.00 https://buildkite.com/wellcomecollection/experience/builds/1966
1.02 JG: Once the build is done, the tests are quite quick. We just need to pass the deploy catalogue (ecr image) step, and I can deploy to stage.
1.17 JG: Deploying to stage. Probably 10 - 25 from now
1.21 JG: stage seems up.
1.23 JG deploying to prod
1.28 Updown recovery: Front End Homepage Front End Stories Front End Articles
Analysis of causes
Schemas in Prismic and generated by devs had got out of sync. Possibly was updated by devs but not updated in Prismic.
There was no way to rollback to a previous version of the schema that was in Prismic.
Actions
Gareth E
Document process for updating the schema
Add contributor / save something on Prismic / deploy fix in the app / remove contibutor / save something on Prismic
Investigate weekly backups so they can be used for this sort of problem in future
Investigate a paid option that will give a development environment (Prismic is currently on the Platinum plan)
David
Look into Prismic error handling
Robert
Investigate why errors slipped through CloudFront
Last updated