Incidents/2023-06-06 dawiktionary/dawiki/svwiktionary partial outage
document status: draft
Summary
| Incident ID | dawiktionary/dawiki/svwiktionary partial outage | Start | 2023-06-06 00:30:00 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Task | T338193 | End | 2023-06-06 03:49:00 |
| People paged | 14 | Responder count | 4 |
| Coordinators | cwhite | Affected metrics/SLOs | |
| Impact | All users of dawiktionary, dawiki, and svwiktionary sometimes received fatal exceptions while browsing. | ||
All users of dawiktionary, dawiki, and svwiktionary sometimes received fatal exceptions while browsing. Logs indicated MediaWiki was encountering a data issue which also entered the object cache. The source of the problem was traced back to a data migration implementation bug in how bash interprets double-quotes (") characters.
Timeline
All times in UTC.
- 2023-05-31 15:45 low level of 500 errors on dawiktionary - data encoding migration begins: task T128155
- 2023-06-06 00:30 errors dramatically increase - OUTAGE BEGINS
- 2023-06-06 01:35 UBN task T338193 filed
- 2023-06-06 02:36 Problem escalated to SRE via Klaxon - investigation begins
- 2023-06-06 03:36 Investigation yields possible data issue - Escalated to DBA running the encoding migration
- 2023-06-06 03:49 Responding DBA detects and implements the fix - Client-facing errors stop - OUTAGE ENDS
Detection
The issue was noticed by a volunteer and reported after business hours via IRC. Another volunteer saw the IRC message and escalated to SRE via Klaxon.
Conclusions
What went well?
- Klaxon notified SRE and a number of engineers responded quickly.
- VO made it easy to escalate the issue to another engineer.
- Once a DBA arrived, the issue was fixed quickly and the root cause identified.
- We intentionally started with small wikis on legacy encoding. Dutch Wikipedia and English Wikipedia could have had the outage instead.
What went poorly?
- The problem surfaced inconsistently when running spot-checks.
- The problem resolution required deep technical knowledge of MediaWiki data formats and internal caching systems.
Where did we get lucky?
- It was early in the morning for them, but a DBA with the necessary expertise responded to the call when requested.
Links to relevant documentation
- N/A
Actionables
- TODO
Scorecard
| Question | Answer
(yes/no) |
Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| People | Were the people responding to this incident sufficiently different than the previous five incidents? | yes | |
| Were the people who responded prepared enough to respond effectively | yes | ||
| Were fewer than five people paged? | no | ||
| Were pages routed to the correct sub-team(s)? | yes | ||
| Were pages routed to online (business hours) engineers? Answer “no” if engineers were paged after business hours. | no | ||
| Process | Was the "Incident status" section atop the Google Doc kept up-to-date during the incident? | no | Not Used |
| Was a public wikimediastatus.net entry created? | no | ||
| Is there a phabricator task for the incident? | yes | ||
| Are the documented action items assigned? | yes | ||
| Is this incident sufficiently different from earlier incidents so as not to be a repeat occurrence? | yes | ||
| Tooling | To the best of your knowledge was the open task queue free of any tasks that would have prevented this incident? Answer “no” if there are
open tasks that would prevent this incident or make mitigation easier if implemented. |
yes | |
| Were the people responding able to communicate effectively during the incident with the existing tooling? | yes | ||
| Did existing monitoring notify the initial responders? | no | Klaxon | |
| Were the engineering tools that were to be used during the incident, available and in service? | yes | ||
| Were the steps taken to mitigate guided by an existing runbook? | no | ||
| Total score (count of all “yes” answers above) | |||