Production failure lab · CR-05
One order. Four charges. Every timeout was reasonable.
Level: PRODUCTION · About 90 minutes · Track: Cost Resilience
A customer placed one order and their statement shows four charges of 49.99, all within six seconds. They noticed before we did.
Order ORD-1001. The order service reports it as CONFIRMED, exactly once, with one receipt. Three timeouts were logged while it was being placed - one by the agent, one by the checkout step, one by the payment service - and each of them was handled exactly as that layer was configured to handle it. No alert fired, because no configured limit was exceeded by anything except time.
Two things are true at the same time: every layer did what it was set up to do, and the customer was charged four times. That is the whole of what is known. Nobody has yet read the three timeouts together.