Error Propagation

I discovered a bug recently — something of a one-off. The kind most people might not even notice. It all started with a single record. Just one. That record belonged to a single campaign — nothing particularly special, just one of several dozen that were running in the system.

At first, it only impacted that campaign, creating some odd behaviors. But the issue remained elusive, and the campaign kept running. It got copied. And when it was copied, the problem came along for the ride. Soon, that copied campaign got copied again, and then again. The issue spread, quietly but quickly, until it wasn’t just one campaign anymore.

Now it was everywhere. Dozens of campaigns, spanning multiple brands, all infected with the same glitch — a glitch that had started as a single bad record. And the thing about outages like this is they don’t just break systems. They break confidence.

We could do a rollback. We could manually resolve these campaigns. We could ensure that the duplication function doesn't carry this problem to the next record. But that just solves the problem today and ignores tomorrow's responsibility.

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When we tolerate intolerance, we are fostering intolerance. When we tolerate a single bug, we open the door for problems to spread.