[Unexpected Downtime Postmortem] Oct 6th

One of the data storage systems (CEPH) encountered a critical failure when Proxmox lost connection to several of its nodes, ultimately resulting in the CEPH configuration being cleared by the Proxmox cluster consensus mechanism. No data, except ElasticSearch, was stored on CEPH.

When the connection was lost to the other nodes, a split-brain occurred (when nodes disagree on which changes are authoritative and which should be dropped). As we tried to recluster all of the nodes, a resolution occured that resulted in the ceph.conf file being wiped and the data on CEPH being unrecoverable.

Thankfully, we’ve suffered no significant data loss, with the exception of having to rebuild the Mastodon ElasticSearch indexes from 6 AM this morning to present.

I’d like to profusely apologize for the inconvenience, but we felt it necessary at the time to offline all services as part of our disaster recovery plan to ensure no damage occurred to the containers while we investigated.