One bad message in a Kafka queue and guess what? The entire queue is down because it kills your workers over and over. To fix it? You have to resize the queue to zero, which means losing requests. This KILLS me. Jay Kreps says there is no reason it can't be fixed, but it never had been and this infuriates me because it happens so often :)
You can modify a consumer groups offset to any value JFYI, so you really don’t need to purge the topic. You can just start after the bad message.