Incident Report: Login Failures due to port exhaustion
Date of Incident: 02/27/2026
Time/Date Incident Started: 02/27, 5:00 PM EST
Time/Date Stability Restored: 02/27, 5:06 PM EST
Time/Date Incident Resolved: 02/27, 5:15 PM EST
Users Impacted: Some
Frequency: Continuous
Impact: Major
Incident description:
On February 27, 2026, the Service Channel platform experienced an issue with the Login and Authentication services, resulting in some users being unable to log in. Additionally, a subset of users who were already logged in encountered authentication errors, which caused their sessions to become invalid.
Monitoring systems alerted the SRE team at 5:00 PM EST. The SRE team initiated incident triage and identified the underlying issue. Service restarts and connection resets restored stability by 5:06 PM EST. All servers and services were fully verified and confirmed operational by 5:15 PM EST.
Root Cause Analysis:
The incident was caused by a sudden increase in concurrent connections to the Login and Authentication services, which resulted in port exhaustion on impacted nodes. As available ports were depleted, the system was unable to establish new connections and intermittently failed to maintain existing authentication sessions. This condition led to users being unable to log in, while a subset of users who were already authenticated experienced session validation failures that caused authentication interruptions. The issue was resolved by restarting the affected nodes, which reset the exhausted ports and restored normal connection handling.
Actions Taken:
Monitoring alerts were received by the SRE team indicating authentication service degradation.
The SRE team initiated incident triage and investigated the login and authentication failures.
Port exhaustion was identified on impacted nodes during troubleshooting.
Recovery actions, including restarting affected nodes and resetting connections, were performed.
Services returned to normal operation following these recovery actions.
Platform functionality was fully verified after stability was restored.