Code Room
On-callHardoc-g677
Subject Networking mtuLevel Senior–Staff~40 minCommon in Networking & APIs interviewsIndustries Technology, Telecom

Question

After migrating a service into a new VPC behind a VPN/overlay tunnel, small requests work perfectly but any request with a large body (file uploads, big JSON payloads) hangs and eventually times out. curl with small payloads returns instantly; the same endpoint with a 20KB body never completes. Packet captures show the large request's first few packets arrive, then silence — the connection stalls mid-transfer and no RST is seen. Pings of normal size succeed; `ping -s 1472 -M do` (don't-fragment) to the peer fails with no reply. The overlay/VPN was introduced in the migration. Diagnose and fix.

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.

Diagram & narrate the incident
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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.