... graceful shutdown writes a log line. Both would be in BetterStack, and there was nothing. So whatever killed the pod didn t let it run any more JavaScript on the way out. The convenient theory The convenient theory was OOM. Node.js services hit the cgroup limit, the kernel reaps the process with SIGKILL, the dashboards spike, the pod restarts. We ve seen it before, and it s the first thing anyone reaches for. We looked, and container memory stayed comfortably ... ... hadn t fired on any of the dead pods, the heap was healthy, and native memory looked normal. It was a tidy theory, and it was wrong. The exit code that didn t match the story When OOM