This morning I decided to look at my blog comments hosted on Meta Jon, which is a free Discourse instance on Oracle Cloud. I discovered my connection had timed out. So I tried to log in directly using ssh:

$ ssh ubuntu@meta.jlericson.com
ssh: connect to host meta.jlericson.com port 22: Connection timed out

Next step, I visited the Oracle Cloud compute instances report, which showed both of my instances running. (I've got a second Discourse for testing.) Since I've been getting emails reminding me to renew my domain, I wondered if there was a problem with DNS configuration. That seemed in order, so went back to the Oracle Cloud page to see if maybe my IP had changed. That's when I discovered I no longer have a public IP for Discourse:

(I'm using a screenshot from my beta Discourse instance, which I haven't fixed yet.)

I followed the reserved public IP link and fixed the problem by reserving a new IP and using it for my Discourse compute instance. Then I had to update DNS (using my domain registrar's website) and wait a few minutes for the change to propagate.

So why did I lose my IP? A search of my email revealed the problem:

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Customer,

We have identified an issue affecting a subset of customers who have become unable to access their Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources.

Customer Impact: Some customers with Free Tier accounts, using Ephemeral or Reserved Public IPs will be unable to access their resources due to the unintentional reclamation of the IPs associated with their Virtual Machines.

While we have taken steps to ensure no further impact occurs, any affected Public IPs will need to be re-established by reassigning a new Public IP through the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console, REST API, SDK CLI or other tools, as described in the following documentation:

https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/Network/Tasks/managingpublicIPs.htm

If a preferred public IP is configured, the public IP assignment may still be reassigned subject to its availability.

Production Event Notification

Time Detected: April 14, 2022 03:50 UTC

Service(s): Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Virtual Cloud Network

Tenant Name: jlericson

Mystery solved and a fairly informative notification. More than I'd expect from a free service, if I'm honest.