On 2 May 2026, search and guild discovery were broken on canary and stable for roughly an hour late in the day. Search routes returned 403, guild discovery silently fell back to a narrower path that returned 36 guilds instead of 203, community creation returned 500s, and indexing workers entered a retry storm.
A change to the Elasticsearch guilds index introduced custom text analysers and pointed existing fields at them. Elasticsearch doesn't allow that kind of analyser change in place, so every API and worker pod that restarted crashed during search initialisation. We rolled live API and worker deployments back to the last known good image to stop the bleeding, then shipped a fix that recognises the new failure modes and lets the existing auto-recovery path delete and recreate the index. The indexers rebuilt it from source-of-truth data automatically, with no data lost. Search, discovery, community creation, and worker indexing are all healthy again.
Apologies for the disruption, and thanks for flying Fluxer.
