Severe instability and segmentation faults with ESPv2 sidecar on GKE

[sergeyku]

Hello. We’re encountering serious stability issues with ESPv2 sidecar when deploying our services on GKE.

Over the past few days, ESPv2 has become completely unstable in our environments:

• The sidecar crashes with a segmentation fault shortly after startup.

• In many cases, it fails to reach a healthy state at all.

• This behavior is permanent — redeploying the service does not help.

• There were no recent config changes or deployments on our side.

• Logs consistently show segmentation faults from the Envoy process (envoy-1.30.1), often during protobuf validation logic.

We tested multiple versions of ESPv2:

• 2.48.0

• 2.50.0

• 2.52.0

Unfortunately, the issue occurred consistently across all of them.

References:

• GitHub issue (active): https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/esp-v2/issues/962

• Issue Tracker (please upvote): https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/429060514

Multiple developers have reported the same issue in both threads.

This issue is currently blocking production deployments. We would greatly appreciate any help, clarification, or workaround you can provide.

Thank you!

[francislouie]

Hi sergeyku,

Welcome to Google Cloud Community!

The root cause is still under investigation by our Google team. If feasible for your project or deployments, some community members have found that downgrading to ESPv1 serves as an interim solution. For updates, please refer to this public issue tracker. Once the issue is resolved, if it reoccurs or persists, please contact our Google Cloud support team.

Was this helpful? If so, please accept this answer as “Solution”. If you need additional assistance, reply here within 2 business days and I’ll be happy to help.