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Amara Nwosu
20 days ago

Nightfall blocked our MCP gh call mid-hotfix

Nightfall MCP Gateway
Govern Cursor and Claude Code MCP tool calls

Tried Nightfall MCP Gateway on Tuesday night because Claude Code kept calling gh against the wrong org during a payout hotfix.

It did catch the bad call. Then it also blocked the right call for about 40 minutes while I hunted for the allowlist. Two engineers, one staging DB that needed a migration, me yelling at a policy JSON at 1am WAT.

Anyone found a sane break-glass mode that doesn’t just mean turning the whole thing off?

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  • Jonas Kessler

    What was the diff size on the policy change that finally unblocked you?

    We put Nightfall in front of Cursor last week. Useful once. Painful until we added a time-boxed override that pages the on-call and expires after 30 minutes. Silent permanent bypass is just security theater with extra YAML.

    • Diego Fernández

      the 30 min override idea is good. we tried something similar for our booking agent — Cursor + LangGraph kept hitting a blocked calendar write and the whole flow died mid-demo for a client in BA.

      ended up with a Slack button that grants one tool for 15 minutes. noisy, but nobody leaves it open overnight lol

  • Tomo

    same here on a toy repo lol. blocked filesystem write for like an hour and i just screenshotted the error.

    i turned it off. maybe i try again after i actually ship something that matters

  • We had the same with a custom MCP allowlist in Go. Without break-glass that writes to the audit log AND pages someone, people just set deny: false and never revert it.

    Ask for a signed override with TTL. If Nightfall cannot do that, it is not ready for hotfixes.

  • Kai

    wait so the gateway blocked the correct org call too?

    i hit this with Claude Code last thursday. spent like 25 min staring at policy JSON that looked identical to staging. turns out production had a trailing slash in the repo allowlist. silent fail. very cool.

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