Last July, my firewall rebooted itself at 2pm on a Tuesday. No warning, no panic log, just a clean reboot. I was in a call, so I didn’t even notice until my VPN dropped and I found myself staring at a spinning reconnect icon.
Turned out the CPU had hit 92 degrees. In a fanless box. In a house in Larnaca. In July. The ACPI firmware did exactly what it should do and yanked the power. But 92 degrees means the silicon had been cooking for a while before the hardware killed it, and I hadn’t set up a single layer of monitoring to catch it on the way up.
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