Your question is Scale for Sudden 10x Traffic Surge. Take a moment with it on the right.
Talk me through your thinking if you like. When you're confident, submit your answer and I'll grade it like a real screen (7/10 or better passes).
Describe how you would scale a backend service to handle a sudden 10x surge in traffic.
Treat the service as an ML-backed API and clarify missing traffic, latency, availability, payload, model, and cost requirements before proposing an architecture. Explain how you would handle online inference, feature access, autoscaling, overload protection, graceful degradation, and the transition back to normal traffic. Discuss how you would validate the design with load tests and monitor model and infrastructure behavior during the surge.