Tailscale Traced 19 Database Corruptions Over 6 Months to a 16-Year-Old SQLite Bug
Tailscale engineer Alex Chan published a postmortem detailing how the company's control plane suffered 19 separate SQLite database corruption incidents over six months, causing repeated downtime for affected tailnet shards. Each shard runs a single Go process with exclusive access to its SQLite database, a design that made the recurring corruption especially puzzling. Early incidents each required over an hour of recovery time, during which users on affected shards lost access to the admin console and API. After months of forensic investigation with no reproducible cause, the team traced the fault to a bug that had existed within SQLite itself for at least 16 years. The postmortem has drawn significant attention in the developer community for its methodical debugging approach, which its author argues is applicable to any team running relational databases in production.
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