Code RoomSplit brain writes after failover
HardPrep Room Coding #2406

Split brain writes after failover

On-callDatabases & SQLReliability & on-callSenior–Staff~40 min

At 02:14 your Postgres primary (managed via Patroni + etcd) became unreachable and Patroni promoted a standby. Writes resumed within 40s. At 02:30 the old primary came back online and your monitoring now shows two nodes both accepting writes for ~6 minutes, and a few duplicate-key and constraint-violation errors are appearing in app logs. The network team reports a transient partition between availability zones during the incident. Walk through how you triage, contain, and recover, and how you prevent recurrence.

What a strong answer looks like

Stop the bleeding first (mitigate), then form hypotheses from real signals. Separate root cause from symptom, communicate status as you go, and close with what prevents a repeat.

0:00 of about 40 min
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