Developer finds MTN Mobile Money timeouts are ambiguous, not failures
A developer testing MTN Mobile Money's sandbox on 16 September ran five identical collection requests via curl, varying only the X-Callback-Url header, and found that callbacks were only delivered when that header was explicitly included. The experiment revealed that the providerCallbackHost field registered during API user creation acts as an allowlist for permitted callback destinations, not an automatic delivery mechanism. A key insight from the tests is that a request timeout cannot be treated as a confirmed failure, since the operator may have processed the payment but lost the response in transit. To handle this ambiguity, the developer's payment system Nkap marks unanswered requests as UNKNOWN and uses a reconciler to keep querying the operator until a conclusive result is returned. If no resolution is found within a set window, the case is escalated to a human rather than being automatically marked as failed.
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