A stale flag's default value routes financial transactions through deprecated code, corrupting data for 6 hours.
Situation
You're the tech lead at a fintech company. An alert fires: financial transaction records don't match between two systems. Investigation reveals an 18-month-old feature flag is evaluating to its default value because the flag provider is timing out, routing transactions through deprecated code that writes data in an old format.
Stakes
The incident is spreading — data corruption has been running for 6 hours. What's your immediate priority?