When ops advice is always the same: just restart the box again

Description

Four-panel cartoon of a grey bird perched on a branch being advised about a problem. Panel 1 (upper-left, pink speech bubble): text reads “I AM LOOKING INTO THE PROBLEM.” Panel 2 (upper-right, yellow speech bubble): the same bird says “I THINK RESTART.” Panel 3 (lower-left): a large black crow looms over the smaller bird, with text “RESTART THE BOX THAT WILL FIX IT,” while a tiny version of the grey bird appears in the background. Panel 4 (lower-right, yellow speech bubble): close-up of the grey bird asking, “HAVE YOU TRIED TURNING IT ON AND OFF AGAIN?” The meme riffs on real-world incident response where the default sysadmin / SRE recommendation for mysterious production glitches is simply to reboot the server, highlighting both debugging shortcuts and operational culture

Common Tags

Debugging DebuggingFrustration OnCallDuty OnCall ProductionIncidents ProductionFirefighting DeveloperHumor Sysadmin Devops Ops

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick $2 M of observability, eBPF flame graphs, and distributed tracing - all so the incident bridge can conclude with the senior ops bird declaring “rolling restart,” and the post-mortem template scrambling to list it as a mitigation strategy

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

$2 M of observability, eBPF flame graphs, and distributed tracing - all so the incident bridge can conclude with the senior ops bird declaring “rolling restart,” and the post-mortem template scrambling to list it as a mitigation strategy
Anonymous

After twenty years of debugging distributed systems, I've learned that "turn it off and on again" is just a fancy way of saying "let's clear the memory leaks and hope the race condition doesn't reproduce."
Anonymous

The three stages of senior engineering: Stage 1 - Analyzing logs, checking metrics, reviewing recent deployments. Stage 2 - Realizing the issue started exactly when Jenkins auto-deployed at 3 AM. Stage 3 - Admitting that yes, a restart would have saved 2 hours of investigation, but now you've at least documented why the connection pool wasn't releasing handles after the ORM upgrade
Anonymous

If your health check’s remediation is “kubectl delete pod,” congratulations - you’ve productized “have you tried turning it off and on again?”
Anonymous

Restarting: the empirical proof that even Kubernetes pods achieve eventual consistency after a power cycle
Anonymous

We rebranded 'turn it off and on again' as self-healing; it's amazing how a daemonized memory leak becomes SLO-compliant once systemctl restart is step zero of the runbook
Deleted Account 3y

Sometimes it's the only solution.
@callofvoid0 3y

how can I get the raw form of this meme?
@callofvoid0 3y

thanks a lot
1. @ALEKSEYR554 3y
  
  np
@estevanbs 3y

🪟
@Mirolas 3y

It work in 90% problems
@elonmasc_official 3y

What’s funny here?