A team's centralized logging pipeline shows a sudden, large gap with no logs at all from a specific service for several hours, even though the service was confirmed to be running and serving traffic during that window.

This points to a failure in the logging pipeline itself rather than the application — check the log shipping agent/sidecar's own health and connectivity to the centralized store, disk space on the log-forwarding component, and whether a recent configuration or credential change (similar to the earlier backup-script scenario) silently broke shipping without an explicit alert on 'log pipeline health' itself.