Retry Storms: How a 502 Fix Created a Thousand Duplicate Orders

Retry Storms: How a 502 Fix Created a Thousand Duplicate Orders In modern distributed systems, transient failures are inevitable. Timeouts, circuit breakers, and retries are standard defense mechanisms. But when idempotency—the guarantee that processing the same request multiple times has the same effect as processing it once—is skipped, retries turn into a destructive force. This isn’t a theoretical scenario. It’s a real incident that unfolded in a production e-commerce system, where a single upstream timeout cascaded into thousands of duplicate orders.