Execute Vercel incident response procedures with triage, mitigation, and postmortem.
Use when responding to Vercel-related outages, investigating errors,
or running post-incident reviews for Vercel integration failures.
Trigger with phrases like "vercel incident", "vercel outage",
"vercel down", "vercel on-call", "vercel emergency", "vercel broken".
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 $VERCEL_TOKEN" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"deploymentId": "dpl_known_good_id"}'
# Verify rollback succeeded
vercel ls --prod
curl -s https://yourdomain.com/api/health | jq .
Step 4: Investigate Root Cause
# Collect evidence while it's fresh
mkdir incident-$(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/
<!-- 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>
Step 6: Communication Templates
Internal — Slack (Incident Start)
: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
Internal — Slack (Mitigation)
: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]
External — Status Page
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].
