# Technical Advisory 69874

Publication date: September 7, 2021

## Description

A bug was introduced in CockroachDB v21.1.8 which would prevent downgrading to earlier v21.1.x patch versions. For this reason, we have removed v21.1.8 from our releases page.

## Statement

Patch releases are expected to maintain upgrade/downgrade/mixed-version compatibility, so a user can upgrade (for example) from v21.1.3 to v21.1.7 and back down to v21.1.5 at will.

A recent change was backported to the release-21.1 branch, that included a new cluster version, which was then included in the v21.1.8 release. This means a cluster that deploys v21.1.8 (and has the default automatic finalization enabled) will be unable to downgrade to v21.1.7 or earlier.

A future release, currently in development, will resolve this issue.

## Mitigation

Users should not upgrade to v21.1.8.

If you have already upgraded to v21.1.8, no action is necessary, but your v21.1.8 cluster is in a state where you must not downgrade to a previous patch release.

If you are running v21.1.7 or earlier, no action is necessary.

## Impact

Users who are running v21.1.8 cannot downgrade to a previous patch release.

Tracking issue: #69874