... restart sometimes and we re used to that, but the weird part was how quiet these restarts were. Every Node.js service we run has a SIGTERM handler that drains connections, flushes a few in-flight jobs, and writes a tidy goodbye line to the logs. None of those lines were there. The process was just gone, and a fresh one was in its place. That ruled out a clean shutdown, and it also ruled out almost any kind of self ... ... every restart we examined. The in-app memory watchdog (which logs and shuts down at 80% RSS) hadn t fired on any of the dead pods, the heap was healthy, and native memory looked normal. It was a tidy