AI Rollback and Incident Closeout

Restore behavior and reconcile state

Choose the smallest approved recovery shape that bounds harm: disable the feature, restore application or prompt configuration, return to a verified model or provider route, rebuild a corrupted index, fail over, or use a manual process. Confirm compatibility before rollback; code, prompts, schemas, data, indexes, policies, tools, and records may have changed together.

Changing traffic does not reverse completed or uncertain side effects. Use operation identifiers, journals, idempotency evidence, data checks, compensating actions, and human review queues to classify every consequential operation as confirmed correct, corrected, cancelled, duplicated and repaired, or still unresolved.

Prove recovery before closing

Verify the restored user journey, quality and safety gates, permissions, tool postconditions, data integrity, latency, capacity, cost, alerts, support readiness, and communications. Keep heightened monitoring for a declared window. Write a blameless timeline and contributing factors, add the minimized failure to the regression set, assign corrective and preventive work, rehearse the changed runbook, and document residual risk.

Incident and recovery authority: [ID -> ROLES]
Rollback target and compatibility: [APP/PROMPT/MODEL/TOOLS/DATA/POLICY]
Recovery start/end and objectives: [UTC -> RTO/RPO OR SERVICE TARGET]
Route/configuration proof: [EXPECTED -> DEPLOYED HASH/VERSION]
Operation reconciliation: [CONFIRMED | CORRECTED | CANCELLED | UNRESOLVED]
Data and index integrity: [CHECK -> RESULT]
User, safety, quality, security, and service gates: [EVIDENCE]
Monitoring window and alerts: [DURATION -> OWNER]
Owner and cadence: [FOLLOW-UP OWNER -> DUE/REVIEW DATE]
Stop criteria: [FAILED GATE | UNRESOLVED SIDE EFFECT | RECURRENCE | MISSING OWNER]
Recovery fallback: [RE-CONTAIN | ALTERNATE VERIFIED PATH | MANUAL PROCESS]
Root cause and regression case: [EVIDENCE -> CASE ID]
Follow-up work and residual risk: [ITEM -> OWNER/DUE/ACCEPTOR]
Closeout approvers: [COMMAND, PRODUCT, RISK, OPERATIONS]
Verification: [USER, SERVICE, DATA, SAFETY, TOOL, AND EXTERNAL STATE]

Expected evidence and verification

Expected evidence includes the authorized rollback target, deployed-version proof, recovery timing, reconciled operation journal, integrity checks, passing quality and safety gates, monitoring observations, communications, root-cause record, regression case, tracked follow-up work, residual-risk acceptance, and closeout approvals. Verify from the user boundary through provider, tools, data, and external postconditions.

Do not close when any blocking gate fails, a consequential side effect remains unresolved without an accepted owner, the incident recurs during observation, affected users or authorities still require communication, corrective work is untracked, or residual risk lacks acceptance. Recovery from a failed rollback means re-containing the workflow, using another preapproved verified path or manual process, preserving evidence, and reopening the decision log.