When their outage becomes your bug

Updated 1 October 2026 · BugsRadar team

The payment provider times out. The shipping API starts returning 500. The SMS gateway decides your key is invalid. None of it is your code, and all of it is your error page. Your users don't know the difference, and neither do you until the first one writes.

The first failure, with the service name

Log the failed call at Error with a message template that names the service: Call to {Service} failed with {StatusCode}. The first occurrence arrives at once with the exception, the stack and the properties, so the message says "Call to Shipping failed with 503" rather than a bare timeout. Repeats are counted in that same message: ×340 in ten minutes means an outage, ×2 means a blip. See What you receive.

One error per service, not per request

Grouping follows the message template and the exception, not the text, so a thousand failed calls with different order numbers are one error with a count. Give the call a module - Payments, Shipping - and on the Pro plan a rule can send the payments module to the people who own the integration and nobody else.

Retries and circuit breakers

If you retry a call, log the final failure, not every attempt, or you will count attempts instead of outages. If a circuit breaker opens, log that once at Error: the message "Circuit for Shipping opened" is the alert, and when it closes again a message at Information tells the chat the outage is over.

What the count tells you

When the message that arrived at 09:02 says ×1,900 by 09:20, you know the scale before the first support ticket. When it stops growing, you know the provider is back. The timestamps in the message are the start and the last occurrence, which is the incident window you will be asked about.

What it doesn't do

BugsRadar doesn't watch the provider's status page or poll their API; it hears about the outage when your code does. For "is their API up" you want their status page or an uptime check of your own. BugsRadar is for "our users are hitting it, now".

Where to go next

Checkout errors you never hear about is the payment flow in particular. Rules routes the integration to its owners.