Distributed Locks Are a Code Smell

Distributed Locks Are a Code Smell The Lock That Lied A single angry support ticket is usually an anomaly. Three identically angry support tickets arriving within 60 seconds about the exact same missing money? That is a pattern. Last quarter, our supposedly bulletproof payment pipeline successfully charged a single customer three times for one order. The investigation dragged on for hours, but the root cause took only four minutes to explain. Here's what actually happened.