How to fix Service has no endpoints: selector does not match any pods in Kubernetes

What this error means

A Headless Service (with clusterIP: None) provides direct pod IP discovery via DNS (no load balancing). When the Service selector does not match any pods, DNS queries return no endpoints. This breaks stateful applications (StatefulSets, clusters) that rely on headless services for peer discovery.

Typical symptoms

• DNS query returns no A records (nslookup returns SERVFAIL)
• Pod cannot connect to peer pods via service DNS
• StatefulSet pods cannot discover each other
• kubectl get endpoints shows empty endpoint list
• Service selector does not match any running pods
• Pod logs show "connection refused" when connecting to service DNS
• SRV record queries fail for headless service

Common causes

1. Pod labels do not match Service selector (typo, case mismatch)
2. Pods not in Running state or still initializing
3. Pods failing readiness probe and not yet "Ready"
4. Service selector expects non-existent labels
5. Pods in different namespace than Service
6. Port numbers do not match between Service and pod
7. Pods killed or evicted before Service selector evaluated

How to fix "Service has no endpoints: selector does not match any pods"

Advanced notes

Related errors

• Failed to connect to server: connection refused (HTTP/2)

  How to fix "HTTP/2 connection refused" error in Kubernetes

  HIGH

• missing request for cpu in container

  How to fix "missing request for cpu in container" in Kubernetes HPA

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• error: invalid configuration

  How to fix "error: invalid configuration" in Kubernetes

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Official resources & further reading

• 📚Kubernetes Official Documentation
• 📖
  Kubernetes API Reference(Official Docs)
• 📖
  Kubernetes Tasks: Run Applications(Official Docs)
• 💬
  Stack Overflow: Kubernetes headless service no endpoints(Stack Overflow)
• 🐙
  Kubernetes GitHub Issues(GitHub)