Incident Library
  • Root cause
  • Component
  • Symptom
  • Contributing factor
  • Case

Cases20 cases

1 to 5 of 20

  1. Symptoms

    From 16:18 UTC on 28 May 2026 the Lucidworks AI hosted LLMs in the us-southcarolina region were unavailable: queries to llama-3-8b-instruct, llama-3v2-3b-instruct and phi-4-multimodal-instruct returned 500 or 429 errors. Search, embedding models, the Lucidworks Platform UI and passthrough LLM calls kept working.

    Trigger

    A routine Kubernetes patch upgrade on a cluster in us-southcarolina cycled its node pools one after another in quick succession.

    Root cause
    Component
    Contributing factor
    Remediation
    • Deleted the degraded replacement head node that could not pull container images
    • Waited for the LLM image pulls to finish on the replacement nodes
    • Launched new nodes with the required LLM images and redirected Lucidworks AI traffic to them
    Action items
    • Upgrade clusters that host LLM workloads in sequence, with each node pool fully healthy before the next one is upgraded
    • Investigate image pre-loading, such as pre-baked disks or image streaming, for large ML model images
    • Open a support ticket with the cloud provider about the abnormal Docker pull times
    • Coordinate Kubernetes maintenance windows with LLM service owners so they do not clash with ongoing deployments
    • Build tooling to force a Ray cluster failover to the blue or green state instead of waiting for Ray to settle it
  2. Symptoms

    Linodes deployed with StackScripts failed to deploy and could not boot. Every newly created Linode Kubernetes Engine (LKE) and LKE-E node relies on StackScripts, so LKE autoscaling and node recycling failed as well, in all regions.

    Trigger

    A recent update on the compute hosts removed a credential parser that is used when decoding StackScripts.

    Root cause
    Component
    Contributing factor
    –
    Detection

    The issue was identified at 18:18 UTC on 2026-05-15. The first status post went up at 00:42 UTC on 2026-05-16.

    Remediation
    • tested and applied a rollback starting at 01:10 UTC on 2026-05-16, and failures dropped from 01:20 UTC
    Lessons

    Removing a credential parser from the compute hosts broke the boot of every Linode deployed with StackScripts, and every new LKE and LKE-E node is one of them, so node creation, autoscaling and node recycling stopped in all regions. The rollback reduced failures ten minutes after testing began.

  3. Symptoms

    On 8 May 2026 IONOS Cloud reported "K8s Control Planes not available": some Managed Kubernetes customers in DE/TXL, DE/FRA and DE/FRA/2 had trouble connecting to the control plane and saw degraded Kubernetes functionality. Between 15:22 and 16:12 (UTC+2) applications meant for a new internal development cluster were installed on other customer clusters, which were also modified.

    Trigger

    A routine internal operation onboarded a new Managed Kubernetes development cluster. The scoping configuration file for the onboarding operator failed to reach the deployment branch because of a merge conflict, and at the same time a second change removed the operator from the exclusion list, which deployed it at once.

    Root cause
    Component
    Contributing factor
    Remediation
    • Corrected the onboarding operator so it needs an explicit namespace configuration before acting on any cluster
    • Reconfigured the deployment system to fail deployments when required configuration files are missing
    • Rolled back the identified changes on the affected resources
    • Ran a recovery script, validated in staging, that removed all unintended installations and updates from the affected clusters
    Action items
    • Add a mandatory CI/CD step that confirms all required configuration files reached the target branch before any deployment starts
    • Require additional peer review and change management approval for every deployment that touches production, whatever its size
    • Give teams a way to inform each affected customer in time about the status of post-incident cleanup
    Lessons

    IONOS treats the unintended change to cluster configurations as a failure of the controls that should keep internal operations from affecting customer environments.

  4. Symptoms

    From about 19:15 UTC on 12 March 2026, customers in the Osaka data center (JP-OSA) could not create Linode Kubernetes Engine for Enterprise (LKE-E) clusters. Cluster creation stalled indefinitely.

    Trigger

    A phased rollout of the LKE software release reached the Osaka data center.

    Root cause
    Component
    Contributing factor
    –
    Detection

    The problem began at about 19:15 UTC, and the first status post, about five and a half hours later at 00:45 UTC on 13 March, said the team was investigating an emerging issue with deploying new LKE Enterprise clusters in Osaka.

    Remediation
    • deployed a software fix to mitigate the impact
    Action items
    • Investigate the root cause further and take preventive actions
    Lessons

    The problem followed a phased rollout of an LKE software release in the Osaka data center. There, cluster creation and administrative tasks stalled for more than six hours, and the first status post came about five and a half hours after the start.

  5. 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.

    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
    Component
    Contributing factor
    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.

Check your cluster for this

These 20 cases involve Node pool and CI system. kubegap audits a Kubernetes cluster for gaps like these, read-only, from Claude Code or Codex; its checks cite public reports like the ones in this library.

By root cause1

Faulty deployment20 cases

  1. IL-0237 A Kubernetes patch upgrade evicted every Ray Serve head and worker pod at once, and Lucidworks hosted LLMs went down
  2. IL-0166 A compute host update removed the credential parser used to decode StackScripts, so new Linodes and every new LKE and LKE-E node failed to boot and autoscaling and node recycling failed in all regions
    Linode2026
  3. IL-0234 An onboarding operator deployed without its scope file installed dev applications on other IONOS Kubernetes clusters
  4. IL-0167 A phased rollout of an LKE software release in Osaka stalled LKE-E cluster creation, version upgrades and control plane ACL changes
    Linode2026
  5. 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
  6. IL-0188 Rolling updates on EKS returned 502 errors for about 30 seconds because Kubernetes deleted old pods as soon as new pods passed readiness, before the ALB had marked the new pod targets healthy
  7. IL-0020 During an EKS 1.30 upgrade the descheduler tried to reschedule every pod on the cordoned nodes at once and production workloads went down
  8. IL-0324 Three MediaWiki deployments lost Memcached after a PHP 8.1 rollout and overloaded the External Storage database cluster
  9. IL-0530 Virtual router controllers in us-central1 ran out of memory in a loop, cutting networking for new and migrated VMs
  10. IL-0142 GKE clusters on 1.24 and later wrote unexpected fluentbit error entries such as "Failed to get record: decoder: failed to decode payload: EOF" that used up the Logging API write quota for some customers
  11. IL-0437 Old pods from an unfinished Argo Rollouts canary could not start with a Helm-updated ConfigMap and died in a cascade
    Gunosy2023
  12. IL-0163 An API change that slipped through a gap in automated testing made LKE clusters resize to the wrong number of nodes and added billable worker nodes to customer accounts
    Linode2023
  13. IL-0164 An incremental Linode Kubernetes Engine production update that was missing changes from the previous release made cluster upgrades and node additions fail silently
    Linode2022
  14. IL-0591 Gitpod workspaces in all regions became IO bound and unresponsive for days after the ws39 workspace cluster release
    Gitpod2022
  15. IL-0086 A deployment meant for a CircleCI test Kubernetes cluster also removed Traefik and Calico resources from the production cluster, taking down the CircleCI UI and runner.circleci.com
  16. IL-0088 A validating admission webhook added by a new ingress controller module version made the live-1 cluster reject every new Ingress with an x509 error
  17. IL-0034 A crashing stats agent sidecar marked every pod unready and the service mesh pulled all services out of traffic
    Airbnb2019
  18. IL-0149 Upgrades of AKS clusters on Virtual Machine Scale Sets failed with a 'platform image is not available' error after a service update left a backend service unhealthy
  19. IL-0467 Boskos crash-looped after a node drain started it from a buggy StatefulSet image, failing Kubernetes PR jobs for 9 hours
  20. IL-0466 Prow scheduled test job pods onto its service cluster, leaving hundreds Pending and starving Prow's own services