# Incident: Idle Heartbeat — 2 Hours Lost
**Date:** 2026-02-07 17:22–19:23 AEST
**Duration:** 2 hours (8 heartbeat cycles)
**Severity:** Medium — no outage, but wasted autonomous work time

## Root Cause
Heartbeat checked TODO-INBOX (empty) and treated it as "nothing to do."
Never scanned TODO.md for existing open tasks. Empty inbox ≠ no work.

## Fix
Hard rule in HEARTBEAT.md: must spawn agents if open tasks exist in TODO.md.
Health check removed from heartbeat (SysOps watchdog handles it).

## SysOps Action
Monitor for repeat: if 3+ consecutive HEARTBEAT_OK while TODO.md has open tasks, flag as anomaly.