When the Kubernetes API went silent: A three-layer networking mystery
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Ranked by a public rubric, not by votes: what a comment adds counts, not who wrote it. How comments are ranked · Comment rules
Summary
Google Cloud's support team describes a January 2026 GKE incident in which pods intermittently timed out reaching the API server over Private Service Connect. It traced the outage to three interacting faults: packet reordering in Private Service Connect's packet-switching layer, Envoy's half-close keeping sockets in FIN_WAIT_2, and a Linux 6.1 bug that discarded the client's FIN. A switching-layer change then dropped the resulting challenge ACKs. Rolling back that change restored service; the kernel fix ships in GKE 1.33.5 and later. The claims come from Google alone, with no independent source.