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Two hundred pods restarted overnight and nobody knows why. How do you debug crash loops at scale, and what is the termination message for?

Exit codes, the previous-container log, and a little-known file at /dev/termination-log that carries a container's last words into kubectl output. Scale triage starts with classification, not with opening pods.

Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in researched DevOps, SRE and platform engineering interview loops, written to a senior-engineer editorial bar, and never padded to hit a word count.

Exit codes, the previous-container log, and a little-known file at /dev/termination-log that carries a container's last words into kubectl output. Scale triage starts with classification, not with opening pods.

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