Incidents Glossary

Browse 62 incidents terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

62 Incidents Terms

Bad Gateway
Often used casually to refer to 502 errors or to the general situation where a proxy or gateway cannot get a valid response from an upstream service. In ops...
Bear Trap
A hidden or easy-to-trigger failure point that catches people unexpectedly. In engineering slang, a bear trap is often a configuration edge case or workflow...
Blame Game
An unproductive cycle where people focus on assigning fault instead of understanding causes and fixing the problem. In incident culture, the blame game is...
Break Glass
To use an emergency-only override, credential, or procedure when normal controls are too slow for the current incident. In security and ops culture, break...
Broke Production
An informal way of saying someone caused or triggered a production outage, incident, or visible service degradation. In engineering culture the phrase is often...
Caught in the Wild
Observed happening in real production use rather than only in tests, demos, or theory. In software slang, a bug caught in the wild usually carries more urgency...
Code Crisis
A moment when code problems have become urgent enough to disrupt plans, trigger escalation, or threaten a release. In engineering slang, a code crisis is...
Code Emergency
A situation where code-related problems need immediate attention to prevent serious user or business impact. In engineering slang, it signals that normal...
Code Firefighter
A developer who spends most of their time jumping from bug to bug, outage to outage, and emergency to emergency. In engineering slang, the code firefighter is...
Code Medic
A person who stabilizes injured code or systems during incidents and immediate recovery periods. In engineering slang, the code medic is focused on triage and...
Code Meltdown
A dramatic breakdown in code behavior, often involving cascading errors, panicked fixes, or widespread instability. In engineering slang, code meltdown...
Code Siege
A period when a codebase or team is under sustained pressure from bugs, deadlines, incidents, or external demands. In engineering slang, code siege suggests...
Code Under Pressure
Writing or modifying code under time pressure, stress, or incident conditions. In engineering culture this phrase usually carries a warning because pressure...
Command Center
A central place, physical or virtual, where people coordinate major operations, launches, or incidents. In tech culture the term is often used for high-focus...
Cyber Incident
A security event that actually threatens or impacts the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of systems or data and therefore requires formal response....
Debugging Culture
The shared habits a team has around investigating problems, forming hypotheses, gathering evidence, and learning from failures. Strong debugging culture values...
Emergency Fix
A fast change made under urgent conditions to stop or reduce damage from a live problem. In engineering slang, emergency fixes are necessary sometimes, but...
Error Culture
The shared way a team responds to mistakes, failures, and bugs, including whether errors are hidden, punished, normalized, or learned from. Error culture...
Everything is Fine
A sarcastic phrase used when things are clearly not fine, often during outages, failed deploys, or fast-moving incidents. It references the broader internet...
Fire Drill
A sudden urgent situation requiring immediate coordinated action, or a rehearsal designed to prepare for such moments. In workplace culture the phrase often...
First Blood
The first visible failure, successful fix, or notable move in a technical conflict or crisis. In engineering slang, first blood marks the moment when things...
Fix Forward
To respond to a production problem by shipping another fix on top of the bad release instead of rolling back. Teams use it when rollback is harder, riskier, or...
Flying Blind
Operating without enough visibility, instrumentation, or reliable feedback to know what is really happening. In engineering slang, flying blind is one of the...
Friendly Fire
Damage caused accidentally by your own side, borrowed from military language and used metaphorically in tech for internal mistakes or cross-team harm. In...
Getting Paged
Being alerted for an operational issue, especially outside normal quiet focus time. In engineering slang, getting paged is both a literal event and a mood...
Human Error
A broad label for mistakes made by people, often used too quickly when a system should really have better safeguards. In engineering slang, 'human error' is...
I Broke It
A direct admission of responsibility for causing a technical problem. In engineering slang, saying 'I broke it' can be painful but is often the fastest path...
Impact Analysis
The evaluation of how a vulnerability, outage, or incident affects systems, data, operations, users, and business priorities. In security response, impact...
Man Down
A dramatic phrase used when a key person, service, or part of the process is unavailable. In engineering slang, it is half humor and half acknowledgment that...
No ETA
A status phrase meaning there is no credible time estimate yet for a fix, response, or completion. Good teams use it when honesty matters more than false...
Oops
A minimal verbal acknowledgement that something just went wrong, often used dryly after an obvious mistake or unexpected failure. In incident chat it can be...
Ops Bridge
The shared communication space, often a call or chat, where operational incident response is coordinated. In engineering slang, the ops bridge is where...
Outage
A period when a service or system is unavailable or degraded enough to count as a real customer-impacting incident. In engineering slang, outages are the...
P0
Priority zero, the highest urgency level in many engineering and support systems, reserved for issues that require immediate attention. It often implies...
Page Me
A request to notify someone through the on-call or alerting system when urgent intervention is needed. The phrase survives from pager-era operations even when...
Panic Mode
A state where urgency and stress take over decision-making, often during outages, deadlines, or major surprises. Sometimes it helps teams move fast; often it...
Postmortem Culture
The way a team handles incident reviews, including whether postmortems are blameless, useful, and tied to real follow-through.
Priority Zero
A level of urgency beyond the ordinary top priority, often reserved for the most severe incidents or blockers. In engineering slang, something called priority...
Prod Down
A blunt shorthand for production being unavailable or badly degraded. In engineering slang, hearing 'prod down' resets the room immediately because priorities...
Production Is Down
A direct statement that a live system is unavailable or severely impaired. In engineering slang, it is the sentence that cuts through theory, bikeshedding, and...
Production Safari
A half-joking term for venturing through the strange and unpredictable terrain of production systems in search of clues or fixes. In engineering slang, it...
Public Report
A report intended for public release that summarizes a security incident, vulnerability, campaign, or assessment in a form suitable for customers, regulators,...
Pull the Plug
To stop a project, service, process, or launch decisively, often because continuing is too risky or no longer justified. The phrase can refer to both literal...
Radio Silence
A period with no updates, responses, or visible signal from someone or something expected to be communicating. In engineering slang, radio silence is...
Red Alert
An emergency state indicating severe risk, outage, or immediate attention required. It often appears in incident language, monitoring, and operations...
Revert Revert
To undo a previous revert, often because the original rollback was premature, incomplete, or later proved unnecessary. The phrase is a familiar sign that...
Rollback Slang
A loose use of 'rollback' for any retreat to an earlier safer state, whether that means undoing code, disabling a feature, or backing out a policy decision. It...
Root Cause
The underlying reason a problem occurred, beyond the immediate symptom that first drew attention. In incident work, finding root cause matters because treating...
Shenanigans
A lighthearted term for suspicious, messy, or unexpectedly weird behavior in systems or people. In engineering it often points to something odd before the...
Shotgun Debugging
A debugging style where many unrelated changes are tried rapidly in hopes that one will fix the issue, rather than isolating the cause systematically. It often...
Stand Back
A dramatic phrase used before attempting a risky fix, daring change, or improvised intervention. It usually mixes humor with very real uncertainty.
Status Page
The page where a company reports service health, incidents, and maintenance updates to users. In engineering slang, the status page is part communication tool...
Status Page Culture
The norms around how openly and accurately a company communicates outages, degradation, and incident progress to customers.
Status Red
A blunt signal that conditions are bad and immediate attention is required. In engineering slang, status red means the room should stop pretending this is...
Take It Down
To disable or remove a system, feature, or service from use. In engineering slang, taking it down is often the fastest way to reduce harm when uncertainty is...
That Escalated Quickly
A dry comment used when a minor issue becomes serious much faster than expected. In engineering slang, it often appears right after a routine-looking alert...
This Is Fine
A meme phrase used when a situation is clearly not fine, usually to cope with visible failure, chaos, or gradual disaster. It is especially common during...
Timeline
An ordered account of what happened and when, especially during incidents or complex projects. In engineering slang, building the timeline is often the fastest...
Triage
The process of quickly assessing incoming issues or tasks so they can be prioritized, routed, and handled appropriately. It is critical in support queues, bug...
war room
A dedicated physical or virtual space where engineers gather to collaborate intensively during a major incident or critical project deadline. In the age of...
War Story
A memorable story about surviving a difficult outage, migration, launch, hack, or technical disaster, often retold as hard-earned institutional wisdom. In...
World Is On Fire
A dramatic way of saying conditions are extremely bad and demand immediate attention. In engineering slang, it usually means priorities just got reset by...

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