Incident Library
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  • Root cause
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  • Symptom
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Cases2 cases

1 to 2 of 2

  1. Symptoms

    At 3:38 PM EDT on 3 June 2026, alerts fired because both the xPRO production CMS and the main xPRO site at https://xpro.mit.edu were returning 503 errors. Fastly, in front of the site, could not connect to the Kubernetes/APISIX origin, because the origin certificate for xpro-web.odl.mit.edu had expired at 3:29 PM EDT.

    Trigger

    The origin certificate xpro-cert for xpro-web.odl.mit.edu, issued on 2026-03-05 with a 90-day validity period, expired at 3:29 PM EDT on 3 June 2026.

    Root cause
    Component
    Contributing factor
    Detection

    Alerts for the xPRO production CMS and the main xPRO site fired at 3:38 PM EDT on the 503 errors, and a Rootly incident was created at 4:08 PM EDT.

    Remediation
    • Deleted and recreated the stale cert-manager certificate resources so that cert-manager issued a fresh origin certificate
    Action items
    • Remove the backend origin domain from the non-OpenEdX xPRO Fastly TLS subscription, so Fastly manages only xpro.mit.edu
    • Deploy the Pulumi update for the xPRO application in Production
    • Trigger cert-manager renewal of the xPRO certificate after the conflicting Fastly validation CNAME is removed
    • Consider tests or policy checks that keep cert-manager-managed origin domains out of Fastly TLS subscriptions
    • Consider alerting earlier on failed cert-manager CertificateRequests and Orders, so stale ACME failures are found before the certificate expires
    Lessons

    Reading the outage as a failed cert-manager ACME renewal was true but incomplete; the missing part was that Fastly had been set to manage validation for a backend origin domain that belonged to cert-manager. The team concluded that TLS certificates and DNS validation records need guardrails around ownership, and that public Fastly frontend domains and Kubernetes/APISIX origin domains must not be treated as interchangeable service domains in TLS automation.

  2. Symptoms

    At 11:32 UTC on 18 November 2021, a user reported in the jenkinsci/jenkins Gitter channel that https://www.jenkins.io/doc/pipeline/steps/ was answering HTTP/503 errors with the message "Guru meditation" from Fastly's varnish.

    Trigger

    The ingress-nginx Helm chart was upgraded from 4.0.6 to 4.0.8 at 10:42 UTC, and the new chart added an admission webhook rule that forbids Nginx configuration blocks in Ingress annotations.

    Root cause
    Component
    Contributing factor
    Detection

    A user reported in the jenkinsci/jenkins Gitter channel at 11:32 UTC that a jenkins.io page answered HTTP/503 errors, and status.jenkins.io reported the incident at 11:49 UTC.

    Remediation
    • Disabled the automated systems, rolled the ingress-nginx chart back to 4.0.6 and deleted the admission webhook by hand
    • Removed the forbidden annotations from the jenkins.io configuration
    • Upgraded the jenkins.io Helm chart to the last version known to work with ingress-nginx 4.0.8
    • Redeployed the jenkins.io Helm chart through the automated system and told Fastly to drop all cached pages
    Action items
    • Always read the changelog in depth when updating the ingress controllers, with two people pairing in real time
    • Add custom Datadog monitoring for www.origin.jenkins.io so that such an outage is detected
    • Make the monitor send the Host header www.jenkins.io so it is not redirected to Fastly
    • Check a set of pages, such as the pipeline steps page, not only the front page
    • Consider an ephemeral k3s end-to-end test before deploying to production
    Lessons

    Trusting a patch version of a Helm chart for the Ingress controller without reading its changelog in depth let a new admission rule remove the jenkins.io Ingress in production. Without monitoring on origin.jenkins.io, a user found the outage. A complete staging cluster with the same DNS setup would have caught the problem before production.

Check your cluster for this

These 2 cases involve CDN and edge network and Admission webhook. 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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