Resources · 3 min read
When automation fails halfway through
Step three of five goes down, the order was created and the invoice wasn't. Nobody finds out until a customer complains. That's where a flow shows, or a system.
Failing isn't the exception: it's the normal state
A five-step automation touches five systems that aren't yours. One will be slow, another will reject you on a rate limit, and a third will have its token expire on a Tuesday at nine. In a demo none of that happens, because the demo runs once. In production it runs hundreds of times a day, and at that scale the improbable is routine.
The problem isn't failing: it's failing halfway
If the flow dies before it starts, nothing happened. The damage is in the middle: the order was created, the confirmation email never went out and inventory was never decremented. Now three systems tell different stories about the same order, and none of them is wrong from its own point of view. Reconciling that by hand costs more than the process you automated.
Retrying without duplicating
The obvious answer is to retry, and that's the trap: the step that failed may well have executed, and what went down was the confirmation that it did. Retrying blindly invoices twice. Every operation touching money or inventory has to be recognizable as the same operation, with a key of its own, so the second attempt updates instead of creating.
What stops the flow and what doesn't
Not every step deserves to halt everything. If the accounting entry fails, the order can't continue. If the thank-you message fails, it can. That distinction gets decided before the flow is written, not once it's broken: critical steps go first and in order, and the incidental ones stay off the path, so a cosmetic failure doesn't block a sale.
Every failure has an owner
An error that only lands in a log is an error nobody will see. What breaks has to reach a person with enough context to decide in a minute: which order, at which step, what's half-done and what fixes it. Without that, the automation didn't remove manual work — it turned it into archaeology.
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