Rebecca Mosner
Why Reliable Webhook Infrastructure Matters
Webhooks are supposed to be simple.
A service tells another service that something happened. One HTTP request, and you're done.
Until you're not.
When webhooks fail, it's not just an error in the logs. It's a failed customer signup. A lost payment. A missing notification. A broken user experience that costs you money, credibility, and sleep.
The truth is: reliable webhook infrastructure is not a “nice-to-have” anymore. It's table stakes for any modern product.
Here's why.
Webhooks power everything now
You might not realize it, but webhooks are behind almost every modern app experience:
Stripe firing off a payment succeeded event
Shopify telling your warehouse that a new order came in
GitHub notifying your CI pipeline to run a build
Twilio updating your system when an SMS gets delivered
Webhooks are how software talks to software in real time. They're critical pipes, not side features.
And just like real plumbing, when something leaks or bursts, the damage isn't pretty.
What actually breaks in webhook systems
When you start handling webhooks yourself, it usually looks like this:
You deploy an endpoint.
You ingest and authenticate events.
You process them.
And it works…that is, until your first real traffic spike, network hiccup, or backend outage. Then you start seeing:
Dropped events: A webhook hits your server when it's restarting. Poof. It's gone.
Silent failures: A downstream system errors out. No alert. No retry. You only find out when users complain.
Scaling bottlenecks: A burst of 10,000 events hits your API during a sale. Your webhook ingestion workers can't keep up.
Security gaps: Anyone who knows your URL can spoof events if you're not validating signatures properly.
Debugging hell: An important webhook failed? Good luck finding which one, why it failed, or if it ever retried.
Webhooks can break because networks are unreliable, clients are flaky, and systems are messy.
What happens when your webhooks aren't reliable
Missed webhooks don't just break features.
They break businesses.
Lost revenue: Payment webhooks that don't trigger order fulfillment. Refunds that never process.
Terrible UX: A user books a ride, pays for it, but the app doesn't update because the webhook didn't land. Rage quit.
Compliance nightmares: Financial apps that fail to log every transaction event properly can fail audits or face penalties.
Engineering overhead: Teams sink hundreds of hours into duct-taping retries, dead-letter queues, and manual replays.
If you think missing a webhook is "no big deal," you're either very lucky or you could be about to find out otherwise the hard way.
What a real webhook system needs to handle
A webhook system that actually works under real-world pressure needs to follow a number of webhook best practices:
Verify event payloads to prevent spoofing or tampering
Queue and retry failed events automatically
Guarantee at-least-once (or exactly-once) processing and idempotency
Detect slow clients and stop backpressure from killing your server
Provide visibility: which events succeeded, which failed, and why
Scale elastically when traffic surges
This is a non-trivial amount of engineering work. Doing it right means building a whole separate mini-infrastructure just for events.
That's why smart teams use dedicated solutions like Hookdeck Event Gateway, built from the ground up to handle the ugly reality of webhooks so you don't have to.
Should you build it yourself?
Technically, you can build your own webhook reliability layer.
You can also build your own database. And your own CDN. And your own email delivery service.
But you probably shouldn't.
The companies who do build their own webhook infrastructure - think Shopify, Stripe, GitHub - have armies of engineers. They built it because they had to. They also spent years getting it right. And even they offload some of their webhook management to third-party tools.
If webhooks are critical to your app (and they probably are), it makes more sense to stand on the shoulders of a service built for this problem from day one.
Hookdeck Event Gateway gives you queueing, retries, observability, replay, scaling, transformations, filtering, routing — all out of the box. Because shipping features > shipping your own webhook infrastructure and ops team.
Conclusion: Reliable webhooks = reliable software
Your app's reliability isn't just about server uptime anymore. It's about whether events actually get delivered, verified, processed, and acted on.
Webhooks aren't a side quest. They're the bloodstream of modern systems. And if you don't treat them like critical infrastructure, sooner or later, you'll feel the pain.
Don't wait for the post-mortem to take webhook reliability seriously.
Start building on solid ground today.
Learn how Hookdeck Event Gateway makes webhook infrastructure effortless