The Retry That Amplified Outages

IdP blip for ninety seconds. Error budgets evaporate. The client library 'helpfully' retries every non-2xx — including 401 and 400 — three times with almost no delay. The dependency was sick; the clients finished it off.

Initial failing signal400 and 401 are retriedExpected behavior: HTTP 400 and 401 responses are not retried. · actual behavior: HTTP 400 and 401 responses are retried.

Progress

1Reproduce the bugRun checks

2Edit the fixOpen

3Pass checksOpen

4Submit fixOpen

Reproduction Steps

Ask shouldRetry(400, 0).
Ask shouldRetry(401, 0).
Ask shouldRetry(503, 0).
Only transient failures should retry.

Focus Mode

Start

src/http-client.js
src/retry.js

Likely area

src/retry.js
src/http-client.js
src/errors.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. time12 min

Workspacepreparing

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Evidence Map

Failing signal loaded from challenge API
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workspace

Outputread-onlyready$ prepare workspace

Preparing workspace