Deeply buried 16-year-old SQLite bug caused last year's Tailscale outages
A 16-year-old SQLite bug, dubbed WAL-Reset, caused last year's Tailscale outages; it took developers six months and a new logging tool to identify the deeply buried issue.
Tailscale's 2023 outages were traced to a 16-year-old bug in SQLite, the company revealed. The flaw, dubbed "WAL-Reset," required six months of investigation and a custom logging tool to uncover. The bug lay dormant in SQLite's write-ahead logging code since 2007, triggering corruption under specific conditions. Tailscale engineers eventually isolated the issue and coordinated with SQLite developers to fix it. The outage affected Tailscale's coordination server, disrupting VPN connectivity for users.