vercel-incident-runbook

Vercel incident response procedures with triage, instant rollback, and postmortem. Use when responding to Vercel-related outages, investigating production errors, or running post-incident reviews for deployment failures. Trigger with phrases like "vercel incident", "vercel outage", "vercel down", "vercel on-call", "vercel emergency", "vercel broken".

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name	vercel-incident-runbook
description	Vercel incident response procedures with triage, instant rollback, and postmortem. Use when responding to Vercel-related outages, investigating production errors, or running post-incident reviews for deployment failures. Trigger with phrases like "vercel incident", "vercel outage", "vercel down", "vercel on-call", "vercel emergency", "vercel broken".
allowed-tools	Read, Grep, Bash(vercel:), Bash(curl:)
version	1.18.0
license	MIT
author	Jeremy Longshore <jeremy@intentsolutions.io>
tags	["saas","vercel","incident-response","runbook"]
compatibility	Designed for Claude Code

Vercel Incident Runbook

Overview

Step-by-step incident response for Vercel deployment failures, function errors, and platform outages. Covers rapid triage, instant rollback, communication templates, and postmortem procedures.

Prerequisites

Access to Vercel dashboard and CLI
Access to Vercel status page (vercel-status.com)
Communication channels (Slack, PagerDuty) configured
Log drain or runtime log access

Instructions

Step 1: Rapid Triage (First 5 Minutes)

# 1. Check if it's a Vercel platform issue
curl -s "https://www.vercel-status.com/api/v2/summary.json" \
  | jq '.status.description, [.components[] | select(.status != "operational") | {name, status}]'

# 2. Check current production deployment status
vercel ls --prod
vercel inspect $(vercel ls --prod --json | jq -r '.[0].url')

# 3. Check recent deployments — did a deploy just happen?
curl -s -H "Authorization: Bearer $VERCEL_TOKEN" \
  "https://api.vercel.com/v6/deployments?target=production&limit=5&projectId=prj_xxx" \
  | jq '.deployments[] | {uid, state, createdAt: (.createdAt/1000 | todate), url}'

# 4. Check function logs for errors
vercel logs $(vercel ls --prod --json | jq -r '.[0].url') --level=error --limit=20

Step 2: Decision Tree

Is vercel-status.com showing an incident?
├── YES → Vercel platform issue
│   ├── Subscribe to updates on status page
│   ├── Post internal status: "Vercel platform incident — monitoring"
│   └── No action needed from us — wait for Vercel resolution
│
└── NO → Issue is in our deployment
    ├── Did a deployment happen in the last 30 minutes?
    │   ├── YES → Likely deployment regression
    │   │   └── ROLLBACK immediately (Step 3)
    │   └── NO → Application-level issue
    │       ├── Check function logs for new errors
    │       ├── Check external dependency status (DB, APIs)
    │       └── Investigate and hotfix (Step 4)
    │
    └── Is the issue region-specific?
        ├── YES → Check function regions, possible edge issue
        └── NO → Global issue, check code and env vars

Step 3: Instant Rollback (< 30 Seconds)

# Option A: Rollback to previous production deployment (fastest)
vercel rollback
# This instantly swaps production traffic — no rebuild needed

# Option B: Rollback to a specific known-good deployment
vercel rollback dpl_xxxxxxxxxxxx

# Option C: Via API (for automation/PagerDuty integration)
curl -X POST "https://api.vercel.com/v9/projects/my-app/promote" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VERCEL_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"deploymentId": "dpl_known_good_id"}'

# Verify rollback succeeded
vercel ls --prod
curl -s https://yourdomain.com/api/health | jq .

# Collect evidence while it's fresh
mkdir incident-$(date +%Y%m%d)
cd incident-$(date +%Y%m%d)

# Function logs around the incident time
vercel logs https://yourdomain.com --limit=200 > function-logs.txt

# Deployment diff — what changed?
curl -s -H "Authorization: Bearer $VERCEL_TOKEN" \
  "https://api.vercel.com/v13/deployments/dpl_broken" \
  | jq '.meta' > broken-deployment-meta.json

# Compare env vars between working and broken deployments
vercel env ls > env-vars.txt

# Check git diff between last good and broken commit
git log --oneline -10
git diff dpl_good_commit..dpl_broken_commit -- api/ src/

// vercel.json — temporary maintenance mode via rewrite
{
  "rewrites": [
    {
      "source": "/((?!_next|api/health).*)",
      "destination": "/maintenance.html"
    }
  ]
}

<!-- public/maintenance.html -->
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head><title>Maintenance</title></head>
<body>
  <h1>We'll be right back</h1>
  <p>We're performing scheduled maintenance. Please check back shortly.</p>
</body>
</html>

:rotating_light: INCIDENT: [Project Name] production issue detected
Status: Investigating
Impact: [Description of user impact]
Start time: [UTC timestamp]
On-call: @[engineer]
Thread: replies here

:white_check_mark: MITIGATED: [Project Name]
Action: Rolled back to deployment dpl_xxx
Impact duration: [X minutes]
Root cause: [Brief description]
Postmortem: [link] scheduled for [date]

Title: Degraded performance on [service]
Body: We are investigating reports of [issue]. Some users may experience
[impact]. Our team is actively working on a resolution.
Update: The issue has been resolved. [Brief root cause].

# Incident Postmortem: [Title]

## Summary
- Duration: [start] to [end] ([X minutes])
- Impact: [users/requests affected]
- Severity: [P1/P2/P3]

## Timeline (UTC)
- HH:MM — [event]
- HH:MM — Alert fired
- HH:MM — On-call acknowledged
- HH:MM — Root cause identified
- HH:MM — Rollback executed
- HH:MM — Service restored

## Root Cause
[What broke and why]

## Resolution
[What was done to fix it]

## Action Items
- [ ] [Preventive action] — Owner: @xxx — Due: [date]
- [ ] [Detection improvement] — Owner: @xxx — Due: [date]
- [ ] [Process improvement] — Owner: @xxx — Due: [date]

Severity	Definition	Response Time	Rollback?
P1	Production down, all users affected	< 5 min	Immediate
P2	Degraded, some users affected	< 15 min	If not fixable in 30 min
P3	Minor issue, workaround exists	< 1 hour	No
P4	Cosmetic or non-urgent	Next business day	No

Scenario	Action
Vercel status page shows incident	Monitor, communicate, no deployment changes
`vercel rollback` fails	Use API promotion: POST to `/v9/projects/.../promote`
Rollback deployment also broken	Deploy from a known-good git tag
Cannot access Vercel dashboard	Use CLI with saved VERCEL_TOKEN
Log retention expired	Check external log drain provider