where is the server ? 
what says 
uname -r
I have seen that once on a server hosted where the the provider support thought a good idea to reboot the server on its own kernel version.  
Also had issues with qpsmtpd failing to start with insufficient memory available abd probably few other issues i did overlook. 
Alternative would have been to manually start mariadb without auth, restore the table from a recent dump and restart the service.