Developer's own automation script silently wiped Instagram sessions nightly for weeks

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A solo developer running 171 daily automation jobs discovered that one of his own scripts had been killing his Instagram login sessions every night, halting posting for nearly two weeks without detection. The culprit was a Chrome profile conflict: a script in one repository force-killed Chrome via pkill when it couldn't reach a CDP port, while a separate Playwright job in another repository was actively using the same shared Chrome profile. The forced kill corrupted the shared Cookie database, wiping Instagram session IDs and silently breaking the posting pipeline. The issue went unnoticed because the monitoring watchdog only checked for process exit codes, not whether any actual output — such as likes or posts — had been produced. The developer has since added output-level checks, including zero-run detection and daily like tallies, to distinguish genuine success from silent failures.

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