Sandboxed Containers Operator inadvertently upgraded to version in v4.18 redhat-operators catalog on OCP4.12 to 4.17 clusters

Solution Verified - Updated

Environment

  • Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (RHOCP) < 4.18
  • Sandboxed-containers-operator(osc) versions on Red Hat OpenShift v4.18

Issue

For several hours on February 3, 2026, Red Hat released 4.18 Red Hat Operators catalog content into 4.12-4.17 clusters. The tags have since been recovered to point at catalogs appropriate for their 4.y. Clusters running 4.12 through 4.17 versions during the window from 2026-02-03 21:16 UTC through 2026-02-04 05:18 UTC were impacted by the 4.18 catalog content.

Specifically, the operators with installPlanApproval:Automatic on Subscription.operators.coreos.com which had updates recommended in the 4.18 catalog had their installed operator version updated to the version present in the 4.18 catalog, regardless of whether that version was appropriate for the version of OCP that the cluster was running.

Therefore, clusters with subscriptions set to Automatic approval may have inadvertently upgraded the Sandboxed Containers Operator to a version intended for OCP 4.18.

Resolution

Based on the detailed impact analysis, our conclusion is that none of the customers that are running this operator in affected OCP versions from 4.12 to 4.17 on bare metal or AWS have a supported version of operator since the versions are either in dev preview or tech preview.

Nevertheless, if any customer encounters an issue related to this, and wants to uninstall the unsupported operator, we recommend they follow the uninstall steps provided in the product documentation for the corresponding product version.

E.g., for OpenShift Sandboxed Containers v1.11:

https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/openshift_sandboxed_containers/1.11/html/deploying_red_hat_openshift_sandboxed_containers/uninstalling-osc

The customer may also reach out to us to know more about upgrading to the latest available supported versions via This content is not included.Red Hat Support.

Root Cause

Red Hat Operator has version higher than the cluster version.

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