Cases2 cases

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1. IL-0378 All Cloudflare R2 object writes and about 35% of reads failed when the R2 Gateway could not authenticate to storage

   Cloudflare2025

   Symptoms

   From 21:38 UTC on 21 March 2025, Cloudflare R2 object storage returned errors for 1 hour and 7 minutes: all object writes failed and about 35% of object reads failed globally. R2 global availability alerts fired at 21:45 UTC, at a 2% error budget burn rate.

   Credentials unavailableHigh error rate

   Trigger

   During a routine rotation of the credentials the R2 Gateway Worker uses to authenticate with the storage infrastructure, the new credentials were deployed to the Worker of the default environment instead of the production Worker, and the old credentials were then removed from the storage infrastructure at 20:37 UTC.

   Root cause

   Operator error

   Component

   Object storage

   Contributing factor

   Unverified assumptionMonitoring blind spotChange with a delayed effect

   Detection

   R2 global availability alerts fired at 21:45 UTC, seven minutes after impact began, at a 2% error budget burn rate, and the R2 engineering team turned to operational dashboards and logs.

   Remediation

   • Deployed the new credentials to the production R2 Gateway Worker, which restored R2 availability

   Action items

   • Add logging tags with the suffix of the credential ID the R2 Gateway Worker uses
   • Require confirmation that the new token ID suffix matches storage infrastructure logs before deleting the old token
   • Run key rotation through the hotfix release tooling, which enforces the environment, instead of manual wrangler commands
   • Write the two-person validation of these changes into the standard operating procedures
   • Extend the closed loop health check system to test new keys, report their status through alerting and confirm global propagation before releasing the gateway Worker
   • Add observability views of upstream success rates that bypass caching

   Lessons

   Because the deletion of the old credentials took effect gradually, availability metrics were a poor way to confirm the change. Cloudflare said the team should have checked directly which token the R2 Gateway service was using to authenticate with the storage infrastructure instead of relying on those metrics.

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2. IL-0460 Vault served an expired TLS certificate and almost every GoCardless service pod crash-looped, a 22-minute full outage

   GoCardless2020

   Symptoms

   On Sunday 25 October 2020 the GoCardless API, dashboard, payment pages and partner integrations were all unavailable for 22 minutes, from 07:32 to 07:54 GMT. Automated monitoring paged the on-call engineer at 07:32, a minute after every request to the API had started failing because no healthy backend was left.

   Service outageContainer crash loopTLS certificate errorsCredentials unavailable

   Trigger

   At 07:22 the TLS certificate Vault was still serving expired. cert-manager had already renewed it, but Vault does not load a new certificate without a restart or a SIGHUP.

   Root cause

   Certificate or credential expiry

   Component

   cert-managerSecrets store

   Contributing factor

   Single point of failureMonitoring blind spotUnverified assumptionHarmful manual action

   Detection

   Automated monitoring detected the failing requests and paged the on-call engineer at 07:32. Certificate expiry monitoring existed for the Layer-7 load balancers but did not cover the TCP load balancer that Vault uses.

   Remediation

   • Forced cert-manager to recreate the Vault certificate
   • Restarted the Vault cluster by hand so it loaded the new certificate
   • Deleted some pods of critical workloads to skip their 5-minute exponential backoff

   Action items

   • Check the certificate of the TCP load balancer in front of Vault with the Blackbox exporter, as for the Layer-7 load balancers
   • Deploy the Reloader controller to roll Vault when its certificate data changes
   • Change theatre-envconsul so envconsul no longer manages the child process and only injects secrets at container startup

   Lessons

   A system that almost every service depends on, such as the secrets store, can take everything down at once, and failure scenarios like Vault becoming unreachable had not been tested enough. Assuming the certificate had expired, when it had been renewed but not reloaded, added a slow and unnecessary recreation step to the recovery.

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