Incident Library
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Cases6 cases

6 to 6 of 6

  1. IL-0089 A test cluster deletion script run with the kube context pointing at the live-1 production cluster deleted its ingress controller, monitoring, logging, cert-manager, kiam and external-dns
    UK Ministry of Justice2020
    Symptoms

    At 18:27 on 21 September 2020 the Cloud Platform team detected that some services running on the live-1 production cluster had gone down, and some users could not reach them. The incident was declared at 18:40.

    Service outageResources deletedMonitoring outageStale endpoint routing
    Trigger

    A script for deleting a test cluster was triggered while the kube context was pointing at the live-1 production cluster instead of the test cluster.

    Root cause
    Operator error
    Component
    Ingress controllerCredential broker for podsexternal-dnsCloud load balancerPrometheus
    Contributing factor
    No safeguard on destructive change
    Detection

    The first detection was at 18:27, and the incident was declared 13 minutes later, at 18:40.

    Remediation
    • restored the default ingress controller together with external-dns and kiam, which it depends on
    • corrected the owner field in the Formbuilder Route 53 TXT records so external-dns pointed their A records at the new NLB
    • restored the remaining components with a targeted apply
    • ran the apply pipeline to restore all certificates, ServiceMonitors and Prometheus rules from the environment repository
    View case
Check your cluster for this

These 6 cases involve Ingress controller and Cloud load balancer. 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.

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By root cause2

Operator error4 cases

Component
Ingress controller3Cloud load balancer1Credential broker for pods1Application database1external-dns1Jobs and CronJobs1Model hub1Persistent volumes and stateful sets1Prometheus1Terraform1
Contributing factor
No safeguard on destructive change4No runbook1No headroom1Overlapping failures1Deferred upgrades1
Organisation
2i2c1GitLab1OpenAI1UK Ministry of Justice1
  1. IL-0095 An engineer deleted the prod namespace of the LEAP JupyterHub while believing the kubeconfig pointed at a new cluster, and the hub was down for about an hour
    2i2c2025
  2. IL-0207 A routine task run from an engineer's local environment switched to production and deleted GitLab.com's Consul release, so Patroni lost Consul and GitLab.com returned 5xx errors to all traffic
    GitLab2022
  3. IL-0115 One of OpenAI's three production AKS clusters went offline through a human error, and rebuilding it took 10½ hours because an AKS Kubernetes upgrade broke the ingress and AKS cannot be downgraded
    OpenAI2022
  4. IL-0089 A test cluster deletion script run with the kube context pointing at the live-1 production cluster deleted its ingress controller, monitoring, logging, cert-manager, kiam and external-dns
    UK Ministry of Justice2020

Configuration change2 cases

Component
Configuration templating2Argo CD1Cloud load balancer1Persistent volumes and stateful sets1
Contributing factor
No safeguard on destructive change2Unverified assumption1Automation amplification1Excessive blast radius1Monitoring blind spot1No runbook1No staged rollout1Missed in review1
Organisation
Grafana Labs1InfluxData1
  1. IL-0192 A Crossplane composition merge-policy change for a TLS policy update switched Kubernetes Services from LoadBalancer to ClusterIP and deleted the load balancers behind about 25% of Grafana Cloud services
    Grafana Labs2025
  2. IL-0009 A duplicated generated name made Argo CD replace the InfluxDB Cloud production Application and delete the whole production environment
    InfluxData2022