SSH Misconfiguration Turned a Routine Migration Revert Into a Live Outage
A developer documentation site went down after a migration pull request deleted a legacy PHP app that production servers were still actively serving via a cron-based git pull deployment. A revert was merged within 13 minutes, but servers could not retrieve it because the SSH deploy key had been removed during migration cleanup, leaving both backends unable to reach the repository. Compounding the issue, multiple SSH keys on the server caused GitHub to authenticate with the wrong identity, returning a misleading 'Repository not found' error. The team bypassed SSH entirely by downloading the repository as a tarball via the GitHub API, staging it on S3, and extracting it directly to the web root to restore service. The incident highlighted how infrastructure components like deploy keys and SSH config aliases can be mistakenly treated as disposable legacy artifacts during migrations.
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