When Retries Become a Denial-of-Wallet

There’s a particular kind of incident that doesn’t show up in your error dashboards. No alerts fire. Latency looks fine, actually — or fine-ish, in that flickering, indeterminate way that makes you suspicious but not certain. What shows up, days later, is a billing anomaly. A line item that’s 4x what you budgeted. And when you dig, you find it: retries. Hundreds of thousands of them.