Clerk Incident Runbook

Overview

Procedures for responding to Clerk-related incidents in production. Covers triage, emergency auth bypass, recovery scripts, and post-incident review.

Prerequisites

• Access to Clerk Dashboard (dashboard.clerk.com)
• Access to application logs and monitoring
• Emergency contact list for on-call team
• Rollback procedures documented

Instructions

Step 1: Triage — Identify Incident Category

Category	Symptoms	Severity
Clerk outage	status.clerk.com shows incident, all auth fails	Critical
Key compromise	Unauthorized access detected	Critical
Middleware failure	All routes return 500	High
Session issues	Users randomly logged out	Medium
Webhook backlog	User sync falling behind	Low

Quick diagnostic:

#!/bin/bash
# scripts/clerk-triage.sh
set -euo pipefail

echo "=== Clerk Incident Triage ==="
echo "Time: $(date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ)"

# 1. Check Clerk status
echo -e "\n--- Clerk Status ---"
curl -s https://status.clerk.com/api/v2/status.json | python3 -c "
import json,sys
d=json.load(sys.stdin)
print(f\"Status: {d['status']['description']}\")" 2>/dev/null || echo "Cannot reach status API"

# 2. Check API connectivity
echo -e "\n--- API Connectivity ---"
HTTP_CODE=$(curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" -H "Authorization: Bearer ${CLERK_SECRET_KEY}" \
  https://api.clerk.com/v1/users?limit=1 2>/dev/null)
echo "API response: HTTP $HTTP_CODE"

# 3. Check app health
echo -e "\n--- App Health ---"
curl -s http://localhost:3000/api/clerk-health 2>/dev/null | python3 -m json.tool || echo "App not reachable"

Step 2: Emergency Auth Bypass (Clerk Outage Only)

// middleware.ts — emergency bypass mode
import { clerkMiddleware, createRouteMatcher } from '@clerk/nextjs/server'
import { NextResponse } from 'next/server'

const EMERGENCY_BYPASS = process.env.CLERK_EMERGENCY_BYPASS === 'true'

const isPublicRoute = createRouteMatcher(['/', '/sign-in(.*)', '/sign-up(.*)'])

export default clerkMiddleware(async (auth, req) => {
  // Emergency bypass: allow all requests when Clerk is down
  if (EMERGENCY_BYPASS) {
    console.warn('[EMERGENCY] Auth bypass active — all requests allowed')
    const response = NextResponse.next()
    response.headers.set('X-Auth-Bypass', 'true')
    return response
  }

  if (!isPublicRoute(req)) {
    await auth.protect()
  }
})

Activate bypass:

# Vercel: set env var and redeploy
vercel env add CLERK_EMERGENCY_BYPASS production  # Set to "true"
vercel deploy --prod

# After Clerk recovers: remove bypass
vercel env rm CLERK_EMERGENCY_BYPASS production
vercel deploy --prod

Step 3: Key Rotation (Compromised Secret Key)

#!/bin/bash
# scripts/rotate-clerk-keys.sh
set -euo pipefail

echo "=== Clerk Key Rotation ==="
echo "1. Go to dashboard.clerk.com > API Keys"
echo "2. Generate new Secret Key"
echo "3. Update all environments:"

# Update production
echo "Updating production..."
# vercel env rm CLERK_SECRET_KEY production
# vercel env add CLERK_SECRET_KEY production  # Paste new key
# vercel deploy --prod

echo "4. Verify all endpoints still work"
echo "5. Monitor for unauthorized access attempts"
echo "6. File incident report"

Step 4: Session Recovery (Mass Logout Fix)

// app/api/admin/refresh-sessions/route.ts
import { auth, clerkClient } from '@clerk/nextjs/server'

export async function POST() {
  const { has } = await auth()
  if (!has({ role: 'org:admin' })) {
    return Response.json({ error: 'Admin only' }, { status: 403 })
  }

  // Force-revoke all sessions (users will need to re-authenticate)
  const client = await clerkClient()
  const users = await client.users.getUserList({ limit: 500 })
  let revoked = 0

  for (const user of users.data) {
    const sessions = await client.sessions.getSessionList({ userId: user.id })
    for (const session of sessions.data) {
      if (session.status === 'active') {
        await client.sessions.revokeSession(session.id)
        revoked++
      }
    }
  }

  return Response.json({ revoked, message: `Revoked ${revoked} sessions` })
}

Step 5: Webhook Replay (Missed Events)

# Check for missed webhooks in Clerk Dashboard:
# Dashboard > Webhooks > Select endpoint > Message Logs
# Click "Retry" on failed messages

# Or replay from your audit log:
echo "Check database for missing user records:"
echo "SELECT clerk_id FROM users WHERE created_at > NOW() - INTERVAL '1 hour'"

Step 6: Post-Incident Review Template

## Incident Report

**Date:** YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM UTC
**Duration:** X hours Y minutes
**Severity:** Critical / High / Medium / Low
**Category:** Clerk Outage / Key Compromise / Config Error / Middleware Failure

### Timeline
- HH:MM — Incident detected (how: monitoring alert / user report / manual)
- HH:MM — Triage started, category identified
- HH:MM — Mitigation applied (emergency bypass / key rotation / rollback)
- HH:MM — Service restored
- HH:MM — Post-incident review completed

### Root Cause
[Description of what caused the incident]

### Impact
- Users affected: X
- Duration of auth downtime: Y minutes
- Data loss: None / Partial / Details

### Action Items
- [ ] Add monitoring for [specific check]
- [ ] Update runbook with [new procedure]
- [ ] Implement [preventive measure]

Output

• Triage script identifying incident category and severity
• Emergency auth bypass middleware (activate via env var)
• Key rotation procedure for compromised credentials
• Session revocation endpoint for mass-logout recovery
• Post-incident review template

Error Handling

Scenario	Response
Clerk API completely down	Activate emergency bypass, monitor status.clerk.com
Secret key compromised	Rotate keys immediately, revoke all sessions, audit logs
Middleware 500 errors	Check middleware.ts syntax, verify Clerk SDK version
Webhook delivery failures	Retry from Dashboard, check endpoint accessibility
Users randomly logged out	Check session lifetime settings, verify domain config

Examples

Quick Status Check One-Liner

curl -s https://status.clerk.com/api/v2/status.json | python3 -c "import json,sys; print(json.load(sys.stdin)['status']['description'])"

Resources

• Clerk Status Page
• Clerk Support
• Clerk Discord

Next Steps

After resolving incident, review clerk-observability for improved monitoring.