Cases2 cases

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1. IL-0568 A layer 2 loop after an access switch change broke network traffic across a whole DeNA site, with mass MACFLAP logs

   DeNA2026

   Symptoms

   At about 20:00 on a weekday, one of DeNA's largest sites reported that terminals of a customer-facing system could not communicate and business was suffering. The network group's monitoring had raised no alert.

   Intermittent connection failuresHigh latency

   Trigger

   During a routine change on 15 Cisco Catalyst 2960L access switches at the site, which tidied descriptions, added VLAN definitions and added allowed VLANs on trunk ports, `no switchport trunk allowed vlan` was applied to GigabitEthernet0/15 of switch SW3, only one of the two physical ports in the LACP bundle between SW3 and SW2.

   Root cause

   Operator error

   Component

   Network switch

   Contributing factor

   Monitoring blind spotNo staged rolloutNo runbookChange during peak hours

   Detection

   The site reported the problem at about 20:00; no monitoring alert fired, because the affected port had no interface monitoring and LACP monitoring had been removed by an earlier monitoring change.

   Remediation

   • Rolled back the switch changes without knowing the cause; service recovered when the interface setting of one switch was restored
   • Found the faulty port and confirmed there was no other impact, completing the first response at about 22:00

   Action items

   • Fix the missing interface and LACP monitoring
   • Require a review for every monitoring change
   • Block merges to the alert rule repository without a reviewer's approval
   • Enable automatic AI review on pull requests
   • Announce every network change in advance, however minor
   • Agree the work date with the site's managers and avoid the site's event days
   • Prepare rollback procedures for high-impact maintenance and for work on several devices at once

   Lessons

   Any change can cause an outage, through a mistake, an unexpected event or a bug, so changes need to be scheduled with a maintenance window agreed in advance. A change on a downstream access switch can affect the whole site. Changing many devices at once made it slow both to find the faulty device and to roll back, and the parts that can be prevented by mechanisms rather than by people's care, such as reviews and monitoring, should be enforced that way.

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2. IL-0525 OpenStreetMap.org went offline for 7h 27m when its uplink switch lost power during a data-centre power feed maintenance

   OpenStreetMap Foundation2022

   Symptoms

   From 20:18 UTC on 11 June 2022, OpenStreetMap.org was unavailable: all of its services hosted in Amsterdam, including www, the API, the wiki and planet, had no connectivity to the Internet. The outage began 18 minutes into Equinix's planned maintenance of power feed A at the Amsterdam data centre.

   Network unreachableService outage

   Trigger

   Equinix's planned 5-year maintenance of power feed A in Amsterdam, which started at 20:00 UTC on 11 June 2022.

   Root cause

   Hardware failure

   Component

   Network switchData center power and cooling

   Contributing factor

   Single point of failureLimited debug accessMonitoring blind spot

   Remediation

   • Waited for the end of the Equinix power feed A maintenance window instead of failing over to Dublin or moving the uplink; connectivity returned at 03:45 UTC

   Action items

   • Acknowledge ongoing outages faster
   • Add monitoring and alerting of switch PSU and FAN states
   • Replace the Cisco SG550X-48 switches and the Redundant Power System with Juniper EX4300 switches with redundant power supplies
   • Install out-of-band access equipment with dual power feeds in Amsterdam
   • Install redundant uplinks
   • Make site failover easier, less manual and lower risk
   • Introduce an on-call pager system for the operations SRE
   • Expand the SRE team
   • Continue and formalise fail-over tests for power, network, upstream link and service outages

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