Today’s GCP outage is hitting hard. We see you. We’ve been there.

If you're on-call, in the incident room, or just trying to keep your systems afloat, this one's for you.

Here are 6 tips to help you survive days like today.

1. Breathe.
Before you dive in, pause. Stay grounded. Clarity matters more than speed when everything’s on fire.
 

2. Triage, Don’t Troubleshoot Everything.
Find the impact surface first. What’s customer-facing? What’s internal? Prioritize based on real business impact.
 

3. Use the Buddy System.
Nobody should suffer alone. Assign a comms lead, a responder, and a runner. Rotate. Burnout is real.
 

4. Use Runbooks & Checklists.
Now’s not the time to rely on memory. If you’ve got docs, use them. If not, write down what you learn, future you will thank you.
 

5. Communicate Early and Often.
Don’t go dark. Internal teams and customers want updates, even if it’s “We’re still investigating.” Silence creates chaos.
 

6. Debrief After, Kindly.
Postmortems aren’t blame sessions. They’re how you build resilience and grow stronger next time.
 

Bonus Tip: PagerDuty Can Help
From automated incident response to status updates to team mobilization, we’re built for days like this.
Stay focused. Stay resilient. And to everyone out there fighting the good on-call fight: #HugOps