Describe a production incident in a cloud environment. How did you handle it?

Give a timeline, and be honest about what you did not know at the time.

• Detection. What alerted you — an Azure Monitor alert, Application Insights failure rate, an availability test, or a customer. If it was a customer, that gap is itself a finding worth stating.
• Triage before diagnosis. Stopping the impact comes first: rolling back a deployment, failing over to a secondary region, scaling out, or disabling a feature flag. Interviewers want to see that you do not debug while users are down.
• Diagnosis. The evidence — Log Analytics queries, Application Insights end-to-end transaction views, Service Health to rule out an Azure-side issue, and activity logs to see what changed.
• The permanent fix. Usually something structural: a missing health probe, no retry with backoff on a transient fault, a single point of failure with no zone redundancy, or a secret that expired with no alert.

Note: Mentioning that you checked Azure Service Health early is a good practical detail — a meaningful share of incidents are platform-side, and confirming that changes the response entirely.