# Redpanda v26.1.17

- Product: Redpanda (https://whatsnew.fyi/product/redpanda)
- Vendor: Redpanda Data
- Date: 2026-08-20
- Version: v26.1.17
- Original notes: https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/releases/tag/v26.1.17
- Permalink: https://whatsnew.fyi/product/redpanda/releases/v26.1.17

What's New is an index, not a publisher: every entry below links to the vendor's own release notes, which are the authoritative source. Entries are labelled where they are hand-curated sample data, pre-releases, or drawn from a secondary source such as a developer blog.

Reuse: the summaries, labels and curation here are © What's New. Quote freely with attribution and a link back; wholesale republication of the corpus is not permitted — terms: https://whatsnew.fyi/terms. The vendors' own release notes remain their publishers'.

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- **fixed** — Fixed audit-log initialization sending unconditional CreateTopics requests to the controller leader that caused authentication and admin API rejection cluster-wide during leaderless states by checking the local topic table first
- **fixed** — Fixed high CPU load on Datalake translators caused by backpressure from the Iceberg coordinator by applying proper jittered sleep instead of spinning on backpressured fetches
- **changed** — Reverted c-ares DNS resolver from 1.34.7 to 1.34.6 due to upstream regression where DNS query completion callbacks could be silently never invoked, causing broker-to-broker RPC connections to be permanently unable to reconnect after peer broker restart

##### Bug Fixes
* Fixed an issue where audit-log initialization unconditionally sent a `CreateTopics` request to the controller leader, causing authentication and the admin API to be rejected cluster-wide (with `audit_failure_policy=reject`) for the duration of any prolonged leaderless state. Initialization now checks the local topic table first and skips the `CreateTopics` call when the audit topic already exists. by @andresaristizabal-rp in [#31411](https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/pull/31411)
* Fixed an issue where backpressure from the Iceberg coordinator caused high CPU load on the Datalake translators. The translation loop was treating a backpressured fetch as a successful iteration and cancelling its retry jitter, causing it to spin as fast as the RPC completed rather than applying the normal jittered sleep. by @pgellert in [#31419](https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/pull/31419)
* Reverted the c-ares DNS resolver from 1.34.7 back to 1.34.6. c-ares 1.34.7 contains an upstream regression ([c-ares/c-ares#1256](https://github.com/c-ares/c-ares/issues/1256)) where a DNS query completion callback can silently never be invoked, which could leave an internal broker-to-broker RPC connection permanently unable to reconnect after a peer broker restart. Affected clusters showed persistently under-replicated partitions and failing broker readiness probes. Reverting c-ares reintroduces CVE-2026-33630; the CVE fix will be re-applied once upstream resolves the regression. by @bartoszpiekny-redpanda in [#31634](https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/pull/31634)

**Full Changelog**: https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/compare/v26.1.16...v26.1.17