Occam’s Razor in the Real World: A Monday Morning Mystery
Posted on Wed 09 April 2025 in Networking
It was a bright, beautiful Monday morning. All was quiet in the land… too quiet.
Since I take Fridays off, Monday mornings are my time to reacquaint myself with the monitoring tools—make sure everything’s still humming along. But this Monday, the silence was broken by a rising tide of tickets flowing into the “network” queue:
“Google Search isn’t working.”
That’s never a good start to the week.
The First Signs
As I began investigating, the volume of tickets kept increasing. A few minutes later, I got a call from the Manager who shared something interesting: this all might have started on Friday. He added me to a chat thread where the Friday coverage team had been discussing some strange behavior.
Reading through the conversation, I saw a lot of theories flying around—some complex, some wild. But one thing jumped out at me:
Occam’s Razor
The simplest explanation is often the correct one.
Clue in the Firewall Logs
I tried reproducing the issue—and succeeded. Google Search was unresponsive. DNS resolution? Fine. Internet access? Working. But something felt off.
I checked the firewall, and that’s where the mystery unraveled: traffic to Google was being denied.
Digging deeper, I found the culprit.
When "Google" Becomes a Game
The firewall's definition update service had pushed a change that reclassified the application "google". Specifically, it tagged doodles.google more restrictive category—one typically associated with games or high-risk entertainment content.
That meant, thanks to automated policy enforcement, outbound access to Google’s search services was now blocked by default under our existing rule set.
No one had manually touched the firewall rules. It was just a subtle classification change that quietly broke a critical service.
A Razor Sharp Reminder
So no, it wasn’t DNS. It wasn’t our upstream provider. It wasn’t some exotic zero-day.
It was a simple classification update and a security policy doing exactly what it was configured to do—with unintended consequences.
Occam’s Razor wins again.
Start simple. Don’t assume conspiracy when configuration is enough.
🔍 Takeaway:
When troubleshooting, especially on a Monday, don’t ignore the basics. Automated tools are powerful, but not infallible. Sometimes, the simplest answer is just hiding behind a quiet update.