War Story: Debugging a Kafka 4.0 Consumer Lag Spike During a Product Launch Using Cilium 1.17 and Datadog 2026

At 09:14 UTC on March 12, 2026, our Kafka 4.0 consumer lag for the payments topic hit 1.2 million messages, 14x our SLA threshold, 12 minutes before a $40M product launch. We fixed it in 47 minutes using Cilium 1.17 eBPF metrics and Datadog 2026's new Kafka integration. Here's how. 📡 Hacker News Top Stories Right Now Ghostty is leaving GitHub (1993 points) Before GitHub (328 points) How ChatGPT serves ads (210 points) Bugs Rust won't catch (33 points) Show HN: Auto-Architecture: Karpathy's Loop