Accidental GCP OS Patch Policy Execution: A Lesson Learned

[sishakil546]

Incident Story:
I was using the GCP OS Patch Management CLI to check the last and next patch dates for my production VMs. By mistake, I executed the patch policy directly without realizing it. Since the CLI didn’t prompt for confirmation, it applied the updates immediately. This caused over 100 production VMs to reboot, leading to a complete stop of our applications and databases. It took around 3 hours to get everything back up and running.

[KAM]

@sishakil546 This is where it's handy to have interns to blame...