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  1. IL-0328 A field type change in the database of CircleCI's job distribution service left all jobs stuck in "not running"
    CircleCI2021
    Symptoms

    From about 18:50 to 19:43 UTC on Monday, November 8, 2021, CircleCI customer jobs on all executors were blocked in a "not running" state. Errors and alerts appeared right after a deploy that changed a field type in the database of the job distribution service.

    Service outageHigh latencyScale-up failureCloud API rate limit exhausted
    Trigger

    At 18:50 UTC a deploy changed the type of a field in the PostgreSQL database of the job distribution service, in a way that was not backwards compatible.

    Root cause
    Faulty deployment
    Component
    DatabaseNode pool
    Contributing factor
    Ineffective rollbackExcessive blast radiusGap in automated tests
    Detection

    Errors and alerts related to the distribution failure appeared immediately after the 18:50 UTC deploy.

    Remediation
    • Rolled back the field type change, which did not clear the errors
    • Wrote, built and manually deployed a change that made the distribution system ignore the field
    • Manually scaled the primary compute cluster for the expected thundering herd of work
    • Monitored until processing was normal and resolved the incident
    Action items
    • Fix the gaps found in the testing strategy
    • Change how the distributor reacts to unexpected data so that this kind of deploy should not affect all jobs
    • Make recovery faster when unforeseen failures occur
    View case
Check your cluster for this

This case involves Database and Node pool. 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 cause1

Faulty deployment1 case

Component
DatabaseNode pool
Contributing factor
Excessive blast radiusIneffective rollbackGap in automated tests
Organisation
CircleCI
  1. IL-0328 A field type change in the database of CircleCI's job distribution service left all jobs stuck in "not running"
    CircleCI2021