🧙 The Council of Elrond at 2 A.M.: Leading the Fellowship Through a Network Outage

There’s a particular kind of quiet that hits an office building after midnight. You know it if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of an alert that drags you out of bed at an ungodly hour. It’s the kind of quiet that makes the hum of the server fans sound like they’re plotting something.

I’ve been here before. The network’s down. No one knows why yet. And suddenly, I’m Elrond, calling the Council together.

Assembling the Fellowship

When a critical outage happens after hours, the first few minutes matter more than anything. Not because you can fix everything right away, but because this is when the Fellowship forms.

I fire up the bridge call. A few engineers join half-asleep, one with that “I swear I just brushed my teeth” voice. Someone from security logs in because they want to make sure it’s not an attack. A manager joins, asking the same question three different ways. Eventually, someone from the vendor pops in.

This is my Rivendell. And like Elrond, my job isn’t to solve the problem alone. It’s to keep this chaotic bunch pointed in the same direction.

Clarifying the Quest

Outages have a way of making people panic. Too many voices, too many half-formed theories. If you don’t bring order to it early, you end up with twelve people chasing ghosts. So I take a page out of the Council’s book.

Elrond didn’t just tell everyone what to do. He defined the stakes. He named the quest.

I lay it out clean:

• What we know

• What we don’t know

• Who’s on point for what

• How we’re tracking progress

No flourishes, no corporate theater. Just enough structure to keep the trolls out of the bridge.

Gandalf, Legolas, Gimli, and the Vendor

There’s always a Gandalf. That one senior engineer who’s seen this kind of thing before and can smell where the problem is hiding. There’s a Legolas too — someone lightning-fast on their terminal who can trace routes like an elf tracks footprints in snow. Gimli is usually the ops person who isn’t elegant but can brute-force a bad config back into place.

And then there’s the vendor. Sometimes they’re Aragorn, riding in to save the day. Sometimes they’re Boromir, getting defensive about their equipment. You never know.

Keeping the Ringbearer Safe

Every incident has a “Ringbearer” too. It might be a critical system, a single database, or the one site that cannot go down. The job is to protect that piece at all costs, even if it means sacrificing some less critical parts of the network along the way.

That’s why, while the Fellowship debates routing loops and power issues, I quietly work out what we can shut down or reroute to keep the ring safe.

Choosing the path

After the shouting, theorizing, and coffee refills, someone finds the root cause. It’s rarely dramatic. More often than not, it’s something absurd — a bad optic, a process that hung at the wrong time, a cable someone kicked.

And like the Council deciding to send Frodo to Mordor, we agree on the plan:
Who’s making the change.
Who’s validating it.
Who’s monitoring the fallout.

And just like that, the Fellowship moves.

The sun comes up

The best part of any outage war story is that moment when the network hums back to life. Services start to breathe again. Monitoring dashboards go green. Someone finally turns off the incident bridge.

We don’t have a big feast like Rivendell. Usually, it’s just me and a lukewarm cup of coffee at 4:30 a.m. staring at blinking LEDs like they just came back from battle.

But every time I lead one of these calls, I think about that Council. No one gets through Mordor alone. And no one gets through a network outage solo either.

✅ Takeaways:

• Early structure keeps panic from spreading.

• Assign clear roles fast, even if the fix isn’t clear yet.

• Protect the “Ring” — the critical system — above everything else.

• Leadership in outages isn’t about heroics. It’s about keeping the Fellowship on task.