Podlipodcast player Webplayer

Programming Tech Brief By HackerNoon

Programming Tech Brief By HackerNoon

Debugging Intermittent Kong 503s When the Logs Showed Nothing but the Status Code

Programming Tech Brief By HackerNoon · Sep 17, 2026 · 6:39

0:006:39

Listen in the Podli app 🎧

Follow your favourite podcasts, listen offline and in the car with CarPlay and Android Auto, and always pick up where you left off. Free to try.

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/debugging-intermittent-kong-503s-when-the-logs-showed-nothing-but-the-status-code.
Investigating intermittent Kong 503 errors with quiet logs, tracing the failure to an NGINX worker restart caused by Kubernetes memory pressure.
Check more stories related to programming at: https://hackernoon.com/c/programming. You can also check exclusive content about #kong-gateway, #kong, #nginx, #nginx-worker-restart, #kubernetes-oom, #lua-vm-metrics, #api-gateway-debugging, #sre-incident-analysis, and more.

This story was written by: @gudevamsikrishna. Learn more about this writer by checking @gudevamsikrishna's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com.

We investigated intermittent Kong 503 responses where the logs showed only the status code and an empty upstream address. Worker-level metrics and dmesg eventually showed that a cgroup OOM event had killed one of the two NGINX workers in the Kong pod.

Episodes: Programming Tech Brief By HackerNoon

PodliGet the free Podli app
↓ App