2024-09-06: 500 error when trying to access repos/projects for some users

Customer Impact

We received reports from ~15 customers who were experiencing some projects and repo pages temporarily not being accessible from 09:05 UTC - 10:27 UTC.

6000 unique users were affected, 2000 of which are probably bots.

Current Status

The root cause has been identified. A globally enabled feature flag ci_akeyless_secret caused saturation on Gitaly and got disabled at 10:19 UTC.

📝 Summary for CMOC notice / Exec summary:

1. Customer Impact: Some customers are experiencing some projects and repo pages being not accessible due to a partial service disruption.
2. Service Impact: ServiceGitaly
3. Impact Duration: 09:05 UTC - 10:27 UTC (82 minutes)
4. Root cause: The feature flag ci_akeyless_secret got enabled globally has caused saturation on Gitaly.

📚 References and helpful links

Recent Events (available internally only):

• Feature Flag Log - Chatops to toggle Feature Flags Documentation
• Infrastructure Configurations
• GCP Events (e.g. host failure)

Deployment Guidance

• Deployments Log | Gitlab.com Latest Updates
• Reach out to Release Managers for S1/S2 incidents to discuss Rollbacks, Hot Patching or speeding up deployments. | Rollback Runbook | Hot Patch Runbook

Use the following links to create related issues to this incident if additional work needs to be completed after it is resolved:

• Corrective action ❙ Infradev
• Incident Review ❙ Infra investigation followup
• Confidential Support contact ❙ QA investigation

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