Cases1 case

1 to 1 of 1

1. IL-0160 A repaired legacy GPU monitoring script sent a firmware query that triggers a race condition in the GPU System Processor of NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada GPUs, locking up GPU Linodes and LKE worker nodes in several regions

   Linode2026

   Symptoms

   From about 21:00 UTC on March 4, 2026, customers using Linodes backed by NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada GPUs saw the GPUs lock up. At first the problem seemed limited to worker nodes of the Linode Kubernetes Engine (LKE); later Linode confirmed that every Linode with this hardware was affected, while Standard Compute and other GPU instances were not.

   GPU unavailableControl plane unresponsive

   Trigger

   Deployment of a repaired legacy GPU monitoring script, fixed during a routine improvement effort to restore a missing metric on internal observability dashboards.

   Root cause

   Faulty deployment

   Component

   Telemetry agentGPU driver

   Contributing factor

   Missed in reviewUnverified assumption

   Detection

   Customers saw the lockups from about 21:00 UTC; the first status post went up at 02:07 UTC on March 5, about 5 hours after the lockups began.

   Remediation

   • Disabled the monitoring script across the GPU fleet
   • Rebooted the affected nodes

   Action items

   • Take improvement and prevention measures to stop a recurrence; the postmortem does not list them

   Lessons

   A monitoring script can take down the hardware it watches. A fix meant only to restore a missing metric brought back a firmware query written for an earlier GPU generation, and on the RTX 4000 Ada architecture that query against an active GPU triggers a lockup. The script ran across the GPU fleet, so every Linode with this GPU was affected in several regions, and the investigation first suspected a regression in the host hypervisor or the GPU firmware.

   View case

By root cause1