Why Your API Integration Keeps Breaking

It worked yesterday. It worked in staging. It passed all your tests. Now it's 2 AM, your phone is buzzing, and the integration is returning garbage. APIs break. Not because anyone did something wrong, but because distributed systems are inherently fragile. The question isn't whether your integration will fail — it's whether you've prepared for when it does. The Usual Suspects After watching hundreds of integrations fail, patterns emerge. Most failures fall into a handful of categories. The API Changed Not maliciously. Not announced with a banner. Just... quietly changed. A new required field appeared in the request A field you depended on now returns null sometimes The date format shifted from ISO 8601 to Unix timestamps A nested object became an array (or vice versa) Error codes got renumbered Versioned APIs help, but not everyone versions properly. And even versioned APIs eventually deprecate old versions. How to survive it: Don't assume response structures are static. Validate that