Over the course of the Avengers storyline, everything has been leading up to the ultimate outage—when Thanos snapped his fingers, eliminating half of all life in the universe.

Come along with me on a journey to perform a retrospective on this greatest of all incidents in the Marvel universe. What were the contributing factors? How could the Avengers have followed better incident response procedures? And can this be reviewed in a truly blameless fashion?

In this talk, I will revisit the storyline across the Marvel Cinematic Universe that led up to a critical event: the “Snap,” when Thanos removes half of all life in the universe at the end of Avengers: Infinity War, as well as the resolution displayed in Avengers: Endgame. We will explore the activities of the incident response teams (the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, and more), to discover what they did well, what they could have done better, and why S.H.I.E.L.D. needs to invest in better Incident Response training.

The audience will learn how to engage in productive Incident Response practices, conduct blameless postmortems, and even why a properly used pager (ala Captain Marvel) can be a key element in successfully navigating even the most dire of universal crises.

Matt Stratton is a Staff Developer Advocate at Pulumi, founder and co-host of the popular Arrested DevOps podcast, and the global chair of the DevOpsDays set of conferences.

Matt has over 20 years of