Current Behavior

We have a handful of domains that have been approved, but the linked domain request has been changed back to a pre-approval state ("In Review", "Action Needed", or "Submitted"), without a clear indication of why.

In a couple of the cases, we know it coincides with the widespread outage for some of our providers in June, but some have happened after that.

The audit log entries for these domains show the following:

1. An entry moving from a pre-approval state --> Approved
2. A later entry moving the domain from Approved --> prior state, with a timestamp after the approval entry above, but an Updated at field with a timestamp that is earlier than the approval.

Expected Behavior

Chat on Slack.

Not actually sure what the expected behavior is because the underlying flow is unclear of how this is happening. However, we generally shouldn't have a domain request that moves back to an unapproved state except in very limited cases where an analyst accidentally approved a domain before they were ready to (all of the domains at issue here were intended to be approved, and an analyst didn't attempt to move them to a non-approved state).

Steps to Reproduce

The flow for these is unknown - we aren't sure how they reverted back to a non-approved state, and the timestamps suggest that there might be some kind of queued action that's getting processed later?

Environment

Stable

Additional Context

We do occasionally have a domain where an analyst marks it as approved, and quickly realizes they unintentionally did so. That is a separate flow that isn't at issue here. The domains affected in this case are all ones where the analyst intended to approve the domain, but the request somehow got moved to a different state.

Specific domains affected are outlined in Slack:

• Thread 1
• Thread 2

Issue Links

No response

Priorities

1. Fix domains affected/from the threads above. They should be marked as Approved, and able to be managed by the domain managers. The 500 errors might be because of mismatched/missing domain information.
2. Temporary fix to try to catch potentially stale saves.
3. Longer-term/not in scope for this ticket: define a specific pathway that is allowed for reverting from Approved back to "In Review" or "Action Needed" such that actions that don't follow this path are rejected/error.