How 131 Process Restarts Silently Broke a Failure-Escalation Guard

A software engineer discovered that a self-healing daemon restarted 131 times in 24 hours, resetting its in-memory failure counter to zero each time and making its escalation threshold permanently unreachable. The guard was designed to alert a human after three consecutive failed self-heal rounds, but because the counter lived inside the process itself, every restart wiped the tally clean. Across 1,501 daemon starts, zero escalations were ever triggered, and unit tests gave no warning since restarts do not occur in that environment. The root cause is that an in-process counter cannot distinguish between a failure never occurring and a failure being forgotten due to a restart. The recommended fix replaces counters with an externally written timestamp file, whose age can be checked independently of process state, making restarts structurally invisible to the alerting logic.