Trigger.dev Bug Created 3,800 Duplicate Tasks — And the System Saw No Error
On December 16, 2024, a nightly server restart caused tasks in the Trigger.dev open-source job framework to get stuck in a 'queued' state, triggering the system's built-in recovery logic. That logic repeatedly requeued already-completed tasks, generating 3,800 duplicates — all of which executed successfully with no errors reported. The incident highlights a foundational challenge in distributed computing: a completed task and a silently abandoned one produce the same external signal, making them indistinguishable to automated systems. This problem traces back to the 1985 Fischer-Lynch-Paterson impossibility theorem, which proves that exact consensus across distributed processes cannot be guaranteed. Major cloud providers, including Google Cloud Tasks, formally document duplicate execution as expected behavior, underscoring that the real engineering challenge is not preventing duplicates but designing systems that can safely tolerate them.
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