Cases6 cases

1 to 5 of 6

1. IL-0405 An expired AWS Load Balancer Controller webhook certificate left no healthy targets and took BSEE SaaS down

   PortSwigger2026

   Symptoms

   From 10:00 UTC on 11 January 2026 every BSEE SaaS instance in PortSwigger's US and Canada regions was unavailable: customers could not open the Web UI or start scans. The platform team learned of it only when customers reported it through support at 09:52 UTC the next day.

   Service outageTLS certificate errors

   Trigger

   The upgrade of the AWS Load Balancer Controller from v1.14.1 to v1.16.0 on 28 November 2025 left an orphaned webhook TLS secret that cert-manager could not renew, and the certificate in it expired on 8 January 2026.

   Root cause

   Breaking change in an upgrade

   Component

   Ingress controllerAdmission webhookcert-managerHelmConfigMaps and SecretsCloud load balancer

   Contributing factor

   Change with a delayed effectMonitoring blind spot

   Detection

   Customers reported the outage through support at 09:52 UTC on 12 January 2026, almost 24 hours after impact began, and the platform team began investigating at 10:00 UTC.

   Remediation

   • Deleted the orphaned aws-load-balancer-tls secrets in the US and Canada clusters
   • Redeployed the AWS Load Balancer Controller configuration with Helm
   • Verified that new certificates were generated and the webhooks worked again

   Action items

   • Audit all clusters for orphaned secrets that have no owning Certificate resource and resolve them
   • Add high-level application access alerting for each SaaS cluster from an external probe

   View case
2. IL-0101 After Google forced a GKE control plane upgrade to 1.33.2 at a deprecation deadline, no new node could initialise, so autoscaling and spot node replacement stopped for 15 hours

   Wealthy2025sev1

   Symptoms

   Nodes that already existed kept running, but every new node, spot or standard, on either v1.32 or v1.33, failed to initialise and could not join the cluster. Spot nodes that were preempted and recreated never came back, so services degraded progressively: background workers on spot instances, reporting services and order allocation stopped completely, and the APIs on existing nodes kept answering but could not scale for load spikes.

   Scale-up failureContainer crash loopService outageDNS resolution failures

   Trigger

   Google upgraded the GKE control plane from v1.32.x to v1.33.2 at the version deprecation deadline, although auto-upgrade was disabled on the node pools.

   Root cause

   Breaking change in an upgrade

   Component

   GKE control planeNode poolClient-side DNS resolver and cachePersistent volumes and stateful setsConfigMaps and Secrets

   Contributing factor

   Deferred upgradesSingle point of failureIneffective rollbackNo headroom

   Remediation

   • Created a new GKE cluster at v1.33, the version of the forced upgrade
   • Upgraded Istio to 1.27.1 for Kubernetes 1.33 compatibility
   • Updated the cert-manager configuration for Kubernetes 1.33
   • Migrated all production workloads to the new cluster and verified pod scheduling, DNS resolution, PVC mounting and external integrations
   • Decommissioned the broken cluster

   Action items

   • Configure all clusters to use the GKE stable release channel
   • Implement a separate management cluster for Argo CD, monitoring and other control components (Q4 2025)
   • Review spot instance usage for critical workloads and add on-demand fallback pools
   • Document the SRE upgrade procedure: management cluster first, production after a monitoring period of several days
   • Document a Kubernetes, Istio and cert-manager compatibility matrix
   • Create an automated upgrade testing pipeline
   • Reserve static IPs for quick migrations
   • Pin versions of Istio, cert-manager, CSI and DNS addons
   • Stay current with stable releases and regularly check GKE alerts and announcements to avoid deprecation deadlines

   Lessons

   GKE upgrades the control plane at a version's deprecation deadline even when auto-upgrade is disabled, so staying inside the supported version window is how to avoid a forced upgrade. A control plane upgrade can leave existing nodes healthy while every new node fails, and spot nodes that cannot rejoin after preemption turn this into cascading failures. Relying heavily on spot instances for critical workers turned a node join failure into a progressive outage. Kubernetes upgrades have to be planned together with dependent components such as Istio and cert-manager, and without a standby cluster on the same provider there was no immediate failover; the only recovery left was building a new cluster.

   View case
3. IL-0324 Three MediaWiki deployments lost Memcached after a PHP 8.1 rollout and overloaded the External Storage database cluster

   Wikimedia Foundation2025

   Symptoms

   On 2025-03-12 from 10:58 UTC, alerts for high backend response times came in, and the MediaWiki deployments mw-api-int, mw-parsoid and mw-jobrunner, which serve MediaWiki for non-user-facing purposes, showed high latency and database errors. The External Storage cluster, whose hosts store the compressed text of wiki page revisions, had a sharp rise in load and connections. The same happened again on 2025-03-13 from 11:15 UTC.

   Database overloadHigh latencyHigh error rateLog floodMonitoring outage

   Trigger

   At 10:44 UTC on 12 March a Scap deployment of the PHP 8.1 rollout for mw-api-int, mw-parsoid and mw-jobrunner was run with the flag -Dbuild_mw_container_image:False; the rollout was deployed with Scap again at 11:15 UTC on 13 March.

   Root cause

   Faulty deployment

   Component

   DatabaseIn-memory cacheConfigMaps and SecretsHelmCI system

   Contributing factor

   Unverified assumptionDependence on a warm cacheSignal buried in noise

   Detection

   Alerts for high backend response times started at 10:58 UTC on 12 March, 14 minutes after the Scap deployment; 2 on-call engineers were paged. The MediaWikiMemcachedHighErrorRate alert that pointed at the cause fired only briefly because its log pipeline was overloaded.

   Remediation

   • Deployed a patch to cirrus-streaming-updater that reduced SUP parallelism
   • Reduced the concurrency of the categoryMembershipChange job in changeprop-jobqueue
   • On 12 March, reverted 1126607 and 1126650 and re-ran Scap
   • On 13 March, rolling-restarted changeprop-jobqueue
   • Rolling-restarted mw-api-int
   • Disabled the categorymembership job in changeprop-jobqueue
   • Reverted 1127476 and 1127478
   • Redeployed mw-api-int to pick up the revert
   • Increased the number of mw-api-int replicas
   • Redeployed mw-jobrunner to pick up the revert
   • Redeployed mw-parsoid to pick up the revert

   Action items

   • Reduce the number of messages sent through channel:Memcached during failures
   • Add helm rollback functionality to Scap
   • Decide whether Scap should update helmfile-defaults when -Dbuild_mw_container_image:False is set
   • Consider removing envvars.inc from MediaWiki images
   • Consider "Why" dashboards that give an overview of a group of related components together with relevant links to follow
   • Coordinate incident responders better
   • Be able to work with MediaWiki developers during incidents

   Lessons

   The write-up puts the weight not on the technical root cause but on why the team could not see, even after the 12 March incident, that three MediaWiki deployments were running without Memcached. Alert dashboards showed what was happening, such as many busy PHP workers, but not why; dashboards linking components that affect each other, such as SQLBlobStore keys and External Storage, would have helped. The alert that pointed in the right direction did not stay firing and would probably have been lost among 78 others. The incident coordinator could not tell who was working on what or who had joined or left, the channels were noisy, the external impact was judged more critical than it was, and trace.wikimedia.org was not used although it might have helped.

   View case
4. IL-0437 Old pods from an unfinished Argo Rollouts canary could not start with a Helm-updated ConfigMap and died in a cascade

   Gunosy2023

   Symptoms

   During a traffic surge from a breaking news alert, pods of a Gunosy service on Kubernetes could not start because the containers could not read their settings from the ConfigMap. The pods that kept running took the extra load and were restarted, failed to start again, and pod after pod died.

   Container crash loop

   Trigger

   A breaking news alert increased traffic and pods were scaled out automatically while a release that removed an old database's settings from the ConfigMap had been rolled out to only one canary pod.

   Root cause

   Faulty deployment

   Component

   ConfigMaps and SecretsHelmProgressive delivery controller

   Contributing factor

   Partial rolloutAutomation amplification

   Action items

   • Configure Argo Rollouts to roll out automatically, with setWeight 1, a one-hour pause and then setWeight 100
   • Add the "helm.sh/resource-policy": keep annotation so Helm keeps past versions of the ConfigMap
   • Build and use a Helm plugin, helm-clear, that keeps only the last few ConfigMap versions by the revision number in their names, set to keep 5 in CD

   Lessons

   Gunosy holds that a review that only resolves to be careful next time would soon be followed by the same failure, because human attention cannot be relied on, so each incident gets a permanent fix built into the system. Keeping past ConfigMap versions also made it possible to roll back quickly without going through CI/CD, which a ConfigMap change had previously prevented.

   View case
5. IL-0185 A disk failure made the first control plane node of a Kubespray cluster read-only, and recovery needed the Kubespray inventory reordered and a new control plane node joined

   Hans H. Kim2023

   Symptoms

   The kernel on a master node of the Kubernetes cluster logged disk I/O errors: "[HAWKEYE] kernel:: [22329228.540857] blk_update_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 795030104 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x0 phys_seg 1 prio class 0". The sda disk switched to read-only, and the machine needed a new disk and an operating system reinstall.

   Node NotReady

   Trigger

   A hardware failure of the disk on the first control plane node.

   Root cause

   Hardware failure

   Component

   KubesprayetcdNode root diskConfigMaps and Secrets

   Contributing factor

   Single point of failure

   Detection

   Disk I/O errors from blk_update_request on dev sda appeared in the node's kernel log.

   Remediation

   • reordered the kube_control_plane group in the Kubespray inventory so that node-2 became the first control plane node
   • removed the failed machine from the cluster
   • edited the cluster-info ConfigMap in kube-public to point at a live control plane node and updated certificate-authority-data
   • installed and configured kubelet and the other components on a new node and joined it as a control plane node with kubeadm, skipping the etcd join phase
   • added the etcd member separately

   Lessons

   In a Kubespray cluster the first node of the kube_control_plane inventory group is special, so its failure needs its own procedure: move another node into the first position, fix the cluster-info ConfigMap, join a new control plane node and add the etcd member back. etcd should be brought back to full membership before another control plane node fails.

   View case

By root cause4