I've been running an app on Kubernetes very smoothly for the past few weeks, until today I found that my Kubernetes master is no longer available.

But the application is still up, seemingly because the cluster's nodes are still available in Google Compute Engine:

(We don't use any compute instances aside from our K8s cluster.)

My gcloud CLI has all the right configuration:

$ gcloud config list
Your active configuration is: [default]

[compute]
...
[container]
use_client_certificate = True
[core]
account = {email}
disable_usage_reporting = True
project = {myproject}

Even my kubectl CLI is configured to use the cluster that once existed:

$ kubectl config current-context
gke_{myproject}_us-central1-a_{clustername}

But any kubectl call results in a timeout.

$ kubectl get pods
Unable to connect to the server: dial tcp {ipv4 address}:443: i/o timeout

gcloud and the Google Container Engine web UI both agree that there are no clusters:

$ gcloud container clusters list
*crickets*