Auth tokens verify on some replicas and fail on others, seemingly at random. Someone blames clock skew. Make the case.

Load balancing makes a per-host fault look like a flaky library. The exact rejection string tells you which way the offending clock leans before you log into anything.

Grounded in researched DevOps, SRE and platform engineering interview loops, written to a senior-engineer editorial bar, and never padded to hit a word count.