Incident Post-Mortem: Ashland, VA Node Degraded Server Performance (April 1, 2026)
Summary:
On Wednesday, April 1, 2026, at approximately 11:15 AM CST, the Normal SMP server hosted on the Ashland, Virginia node experienced degraded performance and downtime due to a plugin loading failure after a manual restart.
Impact:
Players were unable to access the Normal SMP server while plugins failed to load. The server remained offline until the issue was resolved.
Timeline:
11:15 AM CST: Issue observed; plugins not loading after backend panel restart.
Shortly after: The investigation revealed Java version incompatibility.
Following investigation: Upstream provider consulted.
Action taken: Java version changed from 21 to 25 per our upstream provider's recommendation.
Testing: Native plugins confirmed functional.
Resolution: Server brought back online; normal service restored.
Root Cause:
The server’s Java version was running (21), which seemed to be incompatible with our native plugins. This incompatibility prevented some of our plugins from loading after a restart.
Resolution:
We switched the Java version from 21 to 25, which restored plugin compatibility and allowed the server to operate normally.
