What should a SaaS product do when an integration stops working?
I have been thinking about this while working on integrations with third-party platforms.
Imagine a user connects their CRM, payment provider, or another external service. Everything works initially, but a few weeks later, an API token expires or the provider starts rate-limiting requests.
The connection might still appear active, but the data is no longer updating.
There are several ways to handle this. We could automatically retry failed requests, notify the user immediately, show the last successfully synced data with a timestamp, or temporarily disable features that depend on that integration.
The tradeoff is interesting. Too many notifications become annoying, but silently continuing with outdated data can be worse.
My preference is to keep unaffected features available, clearly indicate stale data, and pause actions that require fresh information.
For those building products with third-party integrations, how do you handle these situations? Do you notify users immediately when something fails, or only after automatic retries have been exhausted?
Replies
I've had exactly the case you describe, where it looks connected but nothing's updating. A daily check I run on my own Gmail stopped for days because the account's token had expired. Another tool of mine kept reporting "0 new replies" after the site it reads changed its layout, so it was quietly reading nothing. What I do now is make them fail loudly. If a check can't read anything, it stops and says so instead of returning zero.