Systems stopped talking to each other?

Why it matters

A sync failure can quietly turn into wrong orders, inventory and customer updates.

Orders may not enter an ERP, inventory may stop updating, EDI transactions may remain stuck, or a shipment status may never return to the customer-facing system. The safe next step is to find what was sent, what was accepted and what still needs reconciliation—not to replay everything blindly.

What you may be seeing

Common symptoms

The business may notice:

• Orders are not syncing from a web store into an ERP
• Inventory or customer records are no longer updating
• Webhooks stopped arriving or are returning errors
• OAuth tokens expired or API authentication started failing
• EDI transactions, imports or exports are stuck
• A scheduled integration retries, duplicates or silently drops records

Possible categories

What may be happening

Several layers can produce the same visible symptom. These are the main areas I would separate during triage:

• Token expiration, authentication, permissions or endpoint changes
• A schema, payload, field mapping or validation change
• A queue, worker, retry policy or dead-letter path stopped
• A third-party API changed behavior or rate limits
• A deployment or environment change broke the integration’s assumptions

The investigation

What I can investigate

• Requests and responses, status codes, timestamps and safe redacted payloads
• OAuth/token handling, permissions, signature checks and endpoint configuration
• Schema, mapping, validation, queue and retry behavior
• The gap between source records and destination records
• A controlled retry or reconciliation path that avoids creating duplicates

Before you reach out

What to gather

Anything you already have is useful. Do not delay contact because you do not have every item.

• Which systems should be exchanging data and what has stopped moving
• The last known successful order, export or transaction
• Examples of affected records with private data removed
• Error text, response codes, event IDs and timestamps
• Whether the issue affects every record, one record type or one direction

The next move

What happens next

Text me what you’re seeing and when it started. I’ll ask a few questions and tell you whether it looks like something I can help with.

Honest limits

Failure boundaries

This service is for software and application failures, not ransomware response, digital forensics, breach response or formal cybersecurity incident response. If there is evidence of an active compromise, a cybersecurity or forensics specialist may be appropriate.

Useful answers

Questions people ask