The secrets manager blipped for ten minutes overnight, and applications restarting hours later are still failing. Explain the cascade.

The outage window closed, but every process born since then still tries to fetch secrets at boot with nothing to fall back on. Why restarts keep reopening an incident that already ended.

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.