Gandalf vs. the Balrog: When the Network Tries to Take You Down With It
Some outages feel like fighting a goblin. Annoying, messy, but manageable. Then there are the others. The big ones. The kind that crawl out of the depths of Moria at 2:00 a.m., look you dead in the eyes, and say, “You shall not sleep.”
For me, this one started with a faint flicker on the monitoring dashboard — the kind you almost ignore because it looks like a false alarm. Two minutes later, critical services were falling like dominoes. DNS, authentication, routing… gone. I remember sitting back in my chair and muttering, “Oh, this is going to be a Balrog.”
The First Strike
We traced the issue to a core switch that decided to die spectacularly. Not quietly. Not gracefully. The kind of failure that takes half the network with it like Gandalf falling into the abyss.
I pulled the team together fast. This wasn’t the time for slow diagnostics or polite conversation. I had my “Fellowship” — sysadmins, network folks, and one poor helpdesk analyst who looked like they’d been handed the One Ring.
We spun up redundancy plans, checked our last stable configs, and started rerouting traffic through backup hardware. Every minute felt like a swing of a flaming whip. Every log entry was another roar from the darkness.
Holding the Bridge
This is where the veteran instinct kicks in. You don’t panic. You don’t scream into the void. You plant your staff on the stone bridge and buy your users time.
I spent years building out our redundancy layers, and this was the night it paid off. Routing failover kicked in, DNS stood back up, and we began the long process of isolating the failure point. I’ve had a lot of bad nights in IT, but there’s a very specific feeling when you’re watching graphs slowly stabilize — like watching the Fellowship escape while Gandalf holds the line.
After the Fall
We eventually brought the network back online. Not without scars — a few VLANs were corrupted, and we had to rebuild a couple of configurations from backups — but the core survived. The Balrog was pushed back.
When the dust settled, I pulled the team together for a quick debrief. Nobody wants to do postmortems after a 4 a.m. save, but they’re where the real learning happens. We documented everything: timeline, weak points, decisions that worked and the ones that didn’t.
Lessons from the Abyss
Build your failovers like you’ll actually need them.
Not for compliance. For survival.Outage leadership matters.
Someone has to be Gandalf — calm, decisive, unwilling to let panic take the room.Logs are your sword and shield.
If you don’t have centralized logging, you’re fighting blind in the dark.Sleep is overrated. Coffee is not.