Incident Library
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Cases2 cases

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  1. IL-0005 A new telemetry service overloaded the Kubernetes API servers of large clusters and broke DNS-based service discovery for all OpenAI services
    OpenAI2024
    Symptoms

    Alerts fired at 3:13 PM PST on 11 December 2024, and from 3:16 PM every OpenAI service was significantly degraded or completely unavailable, including ChatGPT, the API and Sora. The status page reported API calls returning errors and difficulties logging in to platform.openai.com and ChatGPT. Customer impact peaked at 3:40 PM.

    Service outageHigh error rateControl plane unresponsiveDNS resolution failures
    Trigger

    At 2:23 PM PST a change introducing a new telemetry service, which collects detailed Kubernetes control plane metrics, was merged and the deployment pipeline started. Between 2:51 PM and 3:20 PM the change was applied to all clusters.

    Root cause
    Configuration change
    Component
    Kubernetes API serverClient-side DNS resolver and cacheTelemetry agent
    Contributing factor
    Unrepresentative stagingNo staged rolloutCache-masked failureMonitoring blind spotLimited debug access
    Detection

    OpenAI's detection tools worked: alerts fired at 3:13 PM PST, a few minutes before customer impact began at 3:16 PM, and the root cause was identified at 3:16 PM.

    Remediation
    • Scaled clusters down to reduce the total Kubernetes API load
    • Blocked network access to the Kubernetes admin APIs so no new expensive requests arrived
    • Scaled up the Kubernetes API servers
    • Removed the telemetry service once enough control was back
    • Moved traffic from impacted clusters to healthy ones
    • Intervened manually in clusters where simultaneous resource downloads saturated resource limits
    Action items
    • Put every infrastructure configuration change through a phased rollout with continuous monitoring of both the service workloads and the clusters, including the Kubernetes control plane
    • Run fault injection tests in which the data plane runs without the control plane for longer, and tests that roll out bad changes on purpose to check detection and rollback
    • Build break-glass mechanisms so engineers can reach the Kubernetes API servers in any circumstances
    • Decouple the Kubernetes data plane from the control plane so that service discovery for critical workloads does not depend on the control plane
    • Speed up recovery with better caching and dynamic rate limiters for resources needed at cluster startup, and regular drills that rapidly replace an entire cluster
    Lessons

    Several systems and processes failed at once and interacted in unexpected ways: tests did not catch the change's effect on the Kubernetes control plane, DNS caching put a delay between the change and the failures, and being locked out of the control plane made remediation very slow. Because service discovery used Kubernetes DNS, the control plane was carrying load for product traffic even though the data plane was meant to be independent of it.

    View case
  2. IL-0118 A global change to Kubernetes namespace labels made the networking layer recompute metadata and overwhelmed the control planes of three of OpenAI's largest GPU clusters
    OpenAI2024
    Symptoms

    From 10:15 am PT on 25 November 2024 a large share of both API and ChatGPT traffic failed with timeouts and 503 errors.

    High error rateHigh latencyControl plane unresponsive
    Trigger

    A global change to Kubernetes namespace labels caused the networking layer to recompute metadata. The change had rolled out to the small clusters without problems.

    Root cause
    Configuration change
    Component
    Kubernetes API server
    Contributing factor
    Excessive blast radiusLimited debug access
    Remediation
    • moved workloads out of the impacted clusters by hand
    • with the cloud provider, scaled up the number of control plane nodes while scaling down the number of data plane nodes, which let the control planes recover
    Action items
    • Lock namespace changes so this incident cannot recur
    • Freeze certain types of infrastructure deploys
    • Allowlist identities to prevent a recurrence of this class of incidents
    • Improve the GPU load balancing logic so traffic is re-routed automatically and more effectively when possible
    • Improve change management for fleet-wide infrastructure changes
    View case
Check your cluster for this

These 2 cases involve Kubernetes API server and Client-side DNS resolver and cache. 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

Configuration change2 cases

Component
Kubernetes API server2Client-side DNS resolver and cache1Telemetry agent1
Contributing factor
Limited debug access2Excessive blast radius1Cache-masked failure1Monitoring blind spot1No staged rollout1Unrepresentative staging1
Organisation
OpenAI2
  1. IL-0005 A new telemetry service overloaded the Kubernetes API servers of large clusters and broke DNS-based service discovery for all OpenAI services
    OpenAI2024
  2. IL-0118 A global change to Kubernetes namespace labels made the networking layer recompute metadata and overwhelmed the control planes of three of OpenAI's largest GPU clusters
    OpenAI2024