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What does "incident" mean in programming?

incident is one of the most common terms in software development. This guide explains what it means, how it is used in practice, and why it matters, with real examples from the developer world.

Definition

An unplanned event that causes or could cause a degradation or outage of a service. Incidents are classified by severity (P0 being the most critical), trigger on-call alerts, require immediate response, and are followed by a postmortem.

Example

"A misconfigured deploy caused a P1 incident — the API returned 500 errors for 15 minutes before rollback."

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