A new bug appears, it’s in an encryption layer. You solve this by deciding to disable the encryption layer because user experience is better without the errors. You write it up as a recruitment piece for your engineering team.

There may be some good answers and lessons, but they didn’t make it into the article. Saying it’s on a cloud provider’s private network so encryption between your nodes isn’t necessary is a bold choice. Also, what happened to the root cause? Why did it start failing a week ago? Was a downgrade of the offending code not possible?

Not all bug investigations are worth really digging into. Sometimes the right call is to find any fix and move on. But all the nuance, judgement, implications, and lessons learned failed to make it into this post. And they are what make reading incident reports interesting for most engineers.