Hotfix Pattern — Problem

Pattern: Hotfix
Component: problem.md
Version: 1.1 | Updated: 2026-07-16

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Statement

During production harm, teams that skip incident command and containment ship oversized “hotfixes,” conflict with each other, and extend customer impact — often creating a second incident during recovery.

Measurable symptoms

Symptom	How you detect it
Slow containment	Time from declare → harm reduced misses SEV target
Scope bloat	Hotfix diff touches unrelated paths or deps
Dual deploy	Two “fixes” land without IC authorization
Evidence loss	Logs rotated / pods deleted before capture
Comms chaos	Customers hear conflicting status

Root cause

Organizations reward “finding root cause live” over stopping impact with a known-good state. Emergency process without roles and abort criteria becomes freestyle engineering.

Non-goals of this pattern

• Not the durable architectural fix (schedule after containment)
• Not the RCA document (use root-cause-pattern)
• Not a bypass for criminal/security forensics holds when those apply
• Not performance optimization theater under a SEV label

Related failure modes

See failures.md.