The failure that taught me to stop trusting the network Yesterday a user updated an order status and the database showed the change — but downstream services never received the event. Payments and fulfillment were out of sync for hours. The root cause was simple and common: a DB-then-publish flow. We committed the DB, then published the event. A network blip (or a thread getting killed during send) produced silent divergence. If you ship events that other teams or systems depend on, the c...