<p>The kubernetes master in one of my GKE clusters became unresponsive last night following the infrastructure issue in us-central1-a.  </p>

<p>Whenever I run "kubectl get pods" in the default namespace I get the following error message:
<strong>Error from server: an error on the server has prevented the request from succeeding</strong></p>

<p>If I run "kubectl get pods --namespace=kube-system",  I only see the kube-proxy and the fluentd-logging daemon.</p>

<p>I have trying scaling the cluster down to 0 and then scaling it back up. I have also tried downgrading and upgrading the cluster but that seems to apply only to the nodes (not the master).  Is there any GKE/K8S API command to issue a restart to the kubernetes master?</p>

<p>There is not a command that will allow you to restart the Kubernetes master in GKE (since the master is considered a part of the managed service). There is automated infrastructure (and then an oncall engineer from Google) that is responsible for restarting the master if it is unhealthy. </p>

<p>In this particular cases, restarting the master had no effect on restoring it to normal behavior because <a href="https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/16011" rel="nofollow">Google Compute Engine Incident #16011</a> caused an outage on 2016-06-28 for GKE masters running in us-central1-a (even though that isn't indicated on the <a href="https://status.cloud.google.com/" rel="nofollow">Google Cloud Status Dashboard</a>). During the incident, many masters were unavailable. </p>

<p>If you had tried to create a GCE cluster using kube-up.sh during that time, you would have similarly seen that it would be unable to create a functional master VM due to the SSD Persistent disk latency issues. </p>
