The authors of the article encountered a high startup latency issue in their usage estimation service application, which was not related to their changes. They investigated the issue and found that it was caused by several bottlenecks in the system, including a misconfigured network proxy, a Linux kernel bug, and saturation of network bandwidth due to packet drops at the hypervisor level. After implementing several fixes, including allocating more CPU to the Envoy sidecar, patching the Linux kernel bug, optimizing AWS instance network configurations, and routing client requests away from terminating pods, they were able to resolve the issue and improve the reliability of their application. The article highlights the importance of observability and monitoring in identifying and resolving complex system issues.