Webhook Failure

Overview

Webhook Failure is a condition where a webhook cannot be delivered, authenticated, accepted, parsed, or applied successfully. It is used to identify asynchronous integration breakdowns before payment or order states diverge. It differs from a business event failure, because the underlying payment may succeed even when its notification fails.

A typical implementation works as follows: A provider sends an event, receives a network error or unsuccessful response, retries under policy, and eventually succeeds or records a terminal delivery failure. Business actions triggered by Webhook Failure should be idempotent and should verify the current object state before fulfillment or accounting updates.

Common risks include DNS errors and TLS problems. Important failure modes include DNS errors, TLS problems, timeouts, 4xx or 5xx responses, invalid signatures, schema changes, and handler defects. These failures can all produce different remedies.

Core controls require teams to classify failures, use bounded retries and dead-letter handling, alert on age and volume, preserve payloads safely, and reconcile authoritative state. A Webhook Failure handler should acknowledge only after durable receipt when the provider’s retry contract depends on the response.

Operational evidence should include event ID, endpoint, attempt history, response, failure class, first and last attempt, and resolution. Webhook Failure should be documented alongside Webhook Timeout, Retry Policy, and API Monitoring. Monitoring for Webhook Failure should track delivery age, signature failures, duplicate rate, retry exhaustion, and unresolved business events.

Replay of Webhook Failure should preserve original identifiers and timestamps so historical processing cannot masquerade as a new event. For Webhook Failure, the event identifier, signature result, delivery attempt, and resulting business state should remain connected throughout processing.