true story. sort of.
02:47
Your phone buzzes. PagerDuty: 14 pods restarting. Grafana: dashboards gone blank.
✓ Code review: approved
✓ CI: green
✓ Matched every flow anyone tested by hand
Then it shipped.
- Liveness probes start failing — the kubelet can't reach the port anymore
- Pods restart in a loop — nothing about that looks like a network problem
- The Prometheus scrape target goes dark — dashboards just stop updating
- "It only allowed less traffic. How could that break anything?"
40 minutes to find it. Zero minutes it would have taken to catch before merge.
A composite of the kind of incident every platform team has lived through.
