CrashLoopBackOff is one of those Kubernetes states that many learners recognize, but fewer people practice investigating in a structured incident-response flow.
It is tempting to treat CrashLoopBackOff as the root cause.
It usually is not.
It is a symptom: Kubernetes is repeatedly trying to restart a container that exits. The actual cause might be missing configuration, a bad command, dependency assumptions, bad startup logic, a failed migration, a missing secret, or something else.
I wanted a small clean-room exercise for practicing the reasoning flow around this kind of incident without using any real company system, private incident, internal runbook, or proprietary material.
