# Self-Healing CI: Recovering a Delayed Webhook Delivery

> A step that fails waiting on a delayed webhook hit a timing problem, not a missed event. See the manual fix and how self-healing CI waits and retries for the callback.

Source: https://latchkey.dev/learn/self-healing-ci/self-healing-webhook-delivery-delayed  
Updated: 2026-06-26

A step that times out waiting for a webhook usually saw the callback arrive late, not never -- waiting a little longer or re-checking clears it.

## What makes a failure safely retryable

Automatic retry is only correct for failures that are genuinely transient. Retrying a deterministic failure wastes minutes and hides a real defect, so the classification matters more than the retry mechanism.

- Safe to retry: network timeouts, registry 5xx, transient DNS failures, a service container that was not ready, a spot instance reclaimed mid-run.
- Not safe to retry: assertion failures, compile errors, lint violations, anything that fails identically on every attempt.
- Ambiguous, and worth investigating rather than retrying: out-of-memory kills, disk exhaustion, and flaky tests. These repeat under load and a retry only hides the trend.
- Always record that a retry happened. A pipeline that silently retries is a pipeline whose real failure rate you do not know.

## FAQ

### What causes Self-Healing CI: recovering a delayed webhook delivery?

A step that waits for an inbound webhook/callback (a deploy confirmation, a build-trigger ack, an external job-complete signal) times out because the delivery was delayed. The event was sent and is valid; the upstream simply delivered it late. A human re-runs the step or extends the wait and the callback is there.

### How do I fix Self-Healing CI: recovering a delayed webhook delivery manually?

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### Can Self-Healing CI: recovering a delayed webhook delivery be fixed automatically?

A delayed webhook is distinguishable from a missing one by whether the event eventually arrives. A self-healing CI pipeline detects the wait-timeout, extends the wait or re-checks for the delivery, and only escalates if the event never arrives, which is the real signal of a dropped delivery rather than a slow one.

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Latchkey runs CI/CD that repairs its own failures. Agent entry points: https://latchkey.dev/agent.txt, https://latchkey.dev/openapi.json, https://latchkey.dev/llms.txt