Timeouts

On a busy concert night, the payment provider's network fails in the worst possible way: its address stops answering at all. No error comes back, no connection is refused, and packets simply disappear. Every POST /bookings request that reaches the charge step stops there and waits.

We reproduced this with a test that pointed the payment client at an address that never answers, with no timeouts configured. The call failed after 42,131 ms, although nothing in the application set a limit. The limit came from below the application, from the HTTP library and the operating system