”what we’re observing is X, but we see Y instead.”
What?
Anyway, I’ve found these kind of interview questions rarely helpful because the scenario is either overly simplistic, or it’s some obscure bug they identified (which they only caught because it caused an outage, i.e. they also didn’t “solve” this when they wrote it).
A similarly poor interview question happens in IT operations when the interviewer asks super specific details about some CVE from 5 years ago that he’s particularly proud of pulling an all nighter to patch a bunch of servers.