Entitlement Checks During an Outage: Fail Open or Fail Closed?

Entitlement outage policy: what to decide

An access service becomes unreachable during a production incident. Blocking every customer may worsen the outage; allowing every request may grant sensitive or expensive capabilities. The right fallback depends on the action.

Distinguish commercial gating from authentication and authorization. A cached commercial entitlement must never bypass user identity or security controls. Define cache age, revocation expectations and the behavior for accounts with no known permission.

Follow one account through the calculation

A previously authorized reporting feature might continue briefly with a cached entitlement. A large prepaid compute purchase might require a fresh balance check. These are design choices to evaluate, not guarantees about any vendor’s current behavior.

Check this before launch

A universal fail-open policy is hard to defend for costly or sensitive actions. A universal fail-closed policy can create avoidable service disruption. Review each class of operation and test the fallback deliberately.

Steps to take next

• Classify actions by security and cost risk.
• Document cache freshness and revocation expectations.
• Keep identity authorization independent.
• Exercise outages with both known and unknown accounts.