Leading through an outage or crisis

Tell me about a time you led a team through a crisis, such as a major outage or incident.

Context

What the interviewer is testing: calm leadership, clear communication and follow-through after the fire.

Clarifying questions to ask first

What did you do in the first hour?
How did you communicate with customers and leaders?
What changed afterwards to prevent a repeat?

How to approach it

Pick one real, specific story (not a hypothetical or a summary of many)
Set the scene in two or three sentences, including the stakes
Spend most of the time on what you personally did and why
End with a measurable result and what you learned

Framework: STAR: Situation -> Task -> Action -> Result, with a short reflection at the end

Sample answer

Clear roles and communication cadence
Customer impact limited
Post-mortem led to real fixes

Situation: specific context, their role, and why it mattered (stakes)
Task: what they personally owned
Action: concrete steps they took, decisions and trade-offs, using "I" not "we"
Result: measurable outcome, plus what they learned or would do differently

Explains the first actions, how they set roles and update cadence, customer communication, the resolution timeline, and preventive changes that stuck.

What interviewers look for

Crisis leadership
Communication
Ownership