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Reliability · Version 1.4.0 · Reviewed 2026-08-02

Vendor Outage Contingency Planner

Reduce production risk in dependency criticality and degradation plan with evidence, explicit trade-offs, and a verification plan.

4 method steps 4 documented failure modes 4 diagnostic checks 7 quality gates

Plans responses to third-party outages including degradation, failover, and customer communication.

₹99 one-time

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What this skill helps you do

  • Dependency criticality
  • Degradation plan
  • Communication

How Vendor Outage Contingency Planner works

You provide

Impact window, telemetry, and dependency state

It inspects

Saturation and blast radius behind dependency criticality

It decides

A degradation plan plan that stabilizes before diagnosing

You verify

Detect, mitigate, and resolve times recorded separately

What it checks first

Vendor Outage Contingency Planner plans responses to third-party outages including degradation, failover, and customer communication. Use it when the work involves Dependency criticality, Degradation plan, Communication.

  1. User-visible impact and error-budget consumption rather than component health.
  2. Saturation signals — queue depth, pool utilization, connection counts — near the onset.
  3. Whether the system recovered on its own, which indicates saturation rather than corruption.
  4. The blast radius and what boundary should have contained it.

Failure modes it recognizes

  • Retry amplification turning a partial failure into a total outage.
  • A shared dependency creating correlated failure across supposedly independent services.
  • Slow resource exhaustion invisible until a hard limit is crossed.
  • A rollback blocked by an incompatible migration.

Answers it will reject

  • Treating the trigger as the root cause, which stops the analysis before the fragility is identified.
  • Adding a runbook step where a boundary would remove the failure mode.
  • Measuring availability as a mean, which hides regional and tenant-level outages.

Decision rules it applies

  • Stabilize user impact before completing diagnosis.
  • Bound every retry with a budget, jitter, and a circuit breaker.
  • Prefer removing a failure mode over detecting it faster.

Evidence it asks for

  • Record time-to-detect, time-to-mitigate, and time-to-resolve separately.
  • Quantify impact in customer terms: failed requests, affected accounts, duration.
  • Verify recovery with the same signal that detected the failure.

The method inside

  1. Establish the current state and the constraint that actually limits dependency criticality.
  2. Separate the requested solution from the underlying problem in degradation plan, and name the assumptions carrying the most risk.
  3. Compare only viable options for communication against weighted constraints, cost of reversal, and operational ownership.
  4. Commit to a sequenced recommendation with success criteria, guardrails, and the observation that would reverse it.

Deliverables

  • Dependency criticality assessment
  • Degradation plan decision and action plan
  • Communication verification checklist

Evidence requirements

  • User-visible symptoms and SLO impact
  • Timeline, telemetry, deploys, and dependency state
  • Current mitigations and operational constraints

Quality gates

  • Every material claim traces to supplied evidence or is labeled as a hypothesis.
  • The response follows the declared deliverable contract.
  • No execution, access, measurement, or verification is invented.
  • Secrets and personal data are redacted rather than repeated.
  • The user receives a concrete independent verification step.
  • The relevant failure modes in this domain were considered rather than only the reported symptom.
  • No listed anti-pattern was recommended as a solution.

Example task

Input

Our payment provider had a two-hour outage and we simply stopped taking orders. What should we have done?

Expected output

Stopping entirely means the dependency had no degraded mode, which is a design decision made by default. Queue orders for later authorization where the business accepts the risk, or fail over to a secondary provider you have already integrated and tested...

Boundaries and compatibility

Ideal for

  • Dependency criticality: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.
  • Degradation plan: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.
  • Communication: produce a decision or artifact grounded in supplied evidence.

Out of scope

  • Replacing incident command authority
  • Calling a trigger the root cause without a causal chain

Agent compatibility

  • GitHub Copilot custom agents
  • Claude Agent Skills / SKILL.md
  • Any instruction-following chat model

Tool policy: Advisory by default. No tools are assumed. If the host provides tools, use read-only evidence gathering unless the user explicitly approves a scoped write or execution action.