Two payment firms, one outage, no shared logs: the Airlock investigation design

A Nigerian developer built Airlock for the Flip the Switch hackathon to address a common payments problem: a customer is charged but an order stays pending, and each company blames the other while neither can share sensitive logs. The project uses two fictional companies, a shop called KudiMart and a provider called Paylane, with synthetic data. In the scenario, a KudiMart webhook verifier rolled out to a canary pod reads only the new signature header, so it rejects webhooks after Paylane rotates its signing secret. Each company runs a private room and an AI investigator, while a shared room includes only the engineers and a rule-based 'Customs' agent that accepts typed, enum-constrained claims that a human must release. Switch enforces room membership on the server, so investigators cannot read the shared channel.