Authentication Cluster Operator in Unknown state and pods showing permission denied error

Issue

• The authentication operator is in an unknown state.

NAME                         VERSION   AVAILABLE   PROGRESSING   DEGRADED   SINCE
authentication                         Unknown     Unknown       Unknown    3s

• The pods inside the openshift-authentication and openshift-authentication-operator namespace are failing with the permission denied error.

$ oc logs oauth-openshift-75c68bbbb6-dvg94 -n openshift-authentication
Copying system trust bundle
cp: cannot remove '/etc/pki/ca-trust/extracted/pem/tls-ca-bundle.pem': Permission denied

• The authentication-operator and oauth-openshift pods are in CrashLoopBackOff state.