Incident Dossier

Attempt Counter Reset Mid-Loop

A reliability team's retry helper was observed to call a downstream service far more times than its configured retry budget during an outage. Logs showed long sequences of identical attempts with the counter apparently starting over each time, suggesting the bookkeeping for the retry budget is broken.

Initial failing signalRetry helper overshoots its attempt budgetExpected behavior: operation called retries + 1 times before rejecting · actual behavior: operation called many more times than retries + 1

Progress

1Reproduce the bugRun checks

2Edit the fixOpen

3Pass checksOpen

4Submit fixOpen

Reproduction Steps

Run npm test.
Inspect the retry loop and follow the value of the attempts variable across iterations.
Notice that the counter never accumulates past 1.
Make the smallest correction so the helper honors its configured retry budget.

Focus Mode

Start

src/retry.js

Likely area

src/retry.js

Challenge Coach

Hints reveal broad direction first, then narrow toward the suspect path without showing hidden tests or exact solution code.

TopicReliability

DifficultyEasy

Est. time15 min

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Evidence Map

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workspace

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