Description

Greetings fellow incident nerds, and welcome to Season 2 of The VOID podcast. The main new thing for this new season is we’re now available in video—so if you’re listening to this and prefer watching me make odd faces and nod a lot, you can find us here on YouTube. 

The other new thing is we now have sponsors! These folks help make this podcast possible, but they don’t have any say over who joins us or what we talk about, so fear not. 

This episode’s sponsor is Uptime Labs. Uptime Labs is a pioneering platform specializing in immersive incident response training. Their solution helps technical teams build confidence and expertise through realistic simulations that mirror real-world outages and security incidents. When most of investment these days in the incident space goes to technology and process, Uptime Labs focuses on sharpening the human element of incident response.

In this episode, we talk to Simon Newton, Head of Platforms at Canva, about their first public incident report. It’s not their first incident by any means, but it’s the first time they chose as a company to invest in sharing the details of an incident with the rest of us, which of course we’re big fans of here at the VOID. 

We discuss:

• What led to Canva finally deciding to publish a public incident report
• What the size and nature of their incident response looks like (this incident involved around 20 different people!)
• Their progression from a handful of engineers handling incidents to having a dedicated Incident Command (IC) role
• Avoiding blame when a known performance fix was ready to be deployed but hadn't yet, which contributed to the incident getting worse as it progressed
• The various ways the people involved in the incident collaborated and improvised to resolve it