In case of doubt, ask for clarification

As an example of what not to do, here I am earlier this year with a teammate, doing some Ops work (Unilog is a backend service, akvoflow-87 is a tenant of another backend service that depends on the Unilog):

I hope it is not obvious to you, as it was not for me, but what my teammate was actually asking was:

Can I completely decommission Unilog forever?

But what I understood was:

Can I stop Unilog for a minute?

Result: a massive slowdown of the whole system for a few hours.

We have been talking about decommissioning that Unilog service the whole week, so it even crossed my mind that maybe it was related to it, I thought he surely cannot be asking about decommissioning it.

Silly me for not asking.