Question

Your payments service has an SLO of 99.9% availability measured over a 30-day rolling window. Two weeks into the current window, a series of latency-related outages has already consumed 95% of the monthly error budget. The product team wants to ship three new features this week, while the SRE team argues the service is too fragile. Your organization follows a documented error budget policy that both teams agreed to in advance. According to standard SRE practice, what should happen next?

Accepted Answer

Freeze non-critical feature releases and redirect engineering effort toward reliability improvements until the budget recovers, as prescribed by the agreed error budget policy.

Answer

Immediately lower the SLO target to 99.5% so the remaining error budget increases, allowing all three features to ship on schedule.

Answer

Allow the feature launches to proceed since the SLO window has not yet ended and the budget is not fully exhausted.

Answer

Escalate to executive leadership to decide each release individually, since the error budget policy does not apply during active incidents.