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Everything Fails Eventually
The question isn't if your system will fail, it's when and how. Payment processors go down. Databases lock up. Network partitions happen. Your job is to make sure failures are contained, visible, and recoverable.
Common Failure Modes in Debt Collections platforms
Cascading failures: Service A times out waiting for Service B, which is waiting for Service C. The timeout is 30 seconds. You now have 30 seconds of backed-up requests across three services.
Resource exhaustion: Database connection pool fills up. New requests can't get connections. System grinds to a halt even though the database is fine.
Silent failures: An API returns 200 but the data is wrong. Your system happily processes garbage until someone notices the accounting doesn't reconcile.
Thundering herd: System comes back online after an outage. Every pending request hits at once. System falls over again.