Some users experienced an outage caused by a misconfiguration in our load balancer. Fortunately, the problem has been quickly fixed.

Issue Summary

Duration: The outage occurred from March 10, 2024, 10:00 AM to March 10, 2024, 10:30 AM (UTC).

Impact: The load balancer failure resulted in degraded performance and intermittent unavailability of our services, affecting approximately 40% of users.

Root Cause: The root cause of the outage was identified as a misconfiguration in the load balancer settings.

Timeline

• 10:00 AM: Issue detected through monitoring alerts indicating a sudden increase in error rates and latency.

• 10:05 AM: Checks performed on back-end servers health and network connectivity but no issues found.

• 10:15 AM: Load balancer configuration was identified as a potential root cause due to recent changes.

• 10:30 AM: Load balancer misconfiguration identified and corrected, restoring services functionalities.

Root Cause and Resolution

Root Cause: The load balancer misconfiguration led to improper routing of traffic between the back-end servers, causing service degradation. Specifically, the misconfiguration included incorrect IP addresses in the load balancer pool, causing traffic to be directed to non-responsive servers.

Resolution: The misconfigured load balancer settings were corrected by updating the back-end server IP addresses in the load balancer pool to ensure proper distribution of incoming traffic among the servers.

Corrective and Preventative Measures

1. Implement automated configuration validation checks for load balancer settings to prevent misconfiguration.

2. Establish thorough documentation and review processes for load balancer configuration changes.

3. Conduct regular audits of load balancer configurations to identify and address potential issues proactively.

4. Enhance monitoring and alerting mechanisms to quickly detect and respond to load balancer failures in the future.