Payment Incident Responder

Purpose

Help teams respond to payment incidents quickly and consistently:

• detect and classify incident severity
• define immediate containment actions
• coordinate internal/external communication
• restore correctness via reconciliation and data repair
• produce postmortem action items

Disclaimer

This skill provides operational guidance only. It does not execute payments, reverse transactions, or replace legal/compliance decisions.

Use at your own risk. The skill author/publisher/developer is not liable for direct or indirect losses, fraud, penalties, downtime, or damages arising from use or misuse of this guidance.

Incident severity model

• P0: broad outage / incorrect success/failure state at scale
• P1: major degradation with partial workaround
• P2: limited impact to specific cohorts or features
• P3: minor issue, low customer impact

Standard response workflow

1. Acknowledge and assign roles
• incident commander
• tech lead
• comms owner
• reconciliation owner

1. Establish blast radius
• affected methods/regions/providers
• impacted users/orders
• error signatures and trend window

1. Contain
• freeze risky deploys
• enable degraded mode messaging
• pause high-risk paths if needed

1. Diagnose
• check webhook pipeline, API errors, queue lag, provider status
• identify first failing component and triggering change

1. Mitigate and recover
• apply safe rollback/fix
• reconcile pending and mismatched states
• verify customer-facing correctness

1. Close and learn
• final incident summary
• postmortem with owner/due-date action items

Guardrails

• Never communicate "resolved" before metrics and correctness checks pass.
• Never run blind retries that can create duplicate charges.
• Always include transaction reference IDs in customer/support comms.
• Keep all decisions time-stamped in incident log.

Output format

When invoked, return:

1. severity + current phase
2. top 3 immediate actions
3. customer impact summary
4. next update time and owner
5. reconciliation and correctness checklist

Setup

Read setup.md on first use.

Validation

Run validation-checklist.md for drills and live incidents.

References

• Triage and mitigation templates: incident-playbook.md
• Stakeholder/customer comms templates: comms-templates.md
• Post-incident tracking template: postmortem-template.md
• Launch/readiness checks: validation-checklist.md