Showerthought: My Zapier automation broke and cost me 4 hours of rework

Had a sales pipeline automation silently fail on me last Tuesday. Took me digging through error logs to find the trigger was pulling from a deleted column. Anyone else ever have a simple fix turn into a half-day disaster?

4 comments

4 Comments

gibson.morgan1mo ago

A deleted column? That is terrifying. Four hours of rework over something that small is exactly the kind of thing that makes me triple check every single setting now. I had a similar thing happen with an email sequence that was sending out old pricing, and it took me an entire afternoon to figure out a field had been renamed in the spreadsheet. Makes you wonder how many little things are just waiting to break.

margaretramirez1mo ago

Is it really that serious though? You sound like you're bracing for a catastrophe, but one spreadsheet mishap doesn't mean everything's about to fall apart.

-1

john_fisher11d agoTop Commenter

Oh come on, give me a break here. @margaretramirez I get what you're saying, but I think people are blowing this way out of proportion. Yeah, losing four hours of work stings, but it's just a spreadsheet, not a root canal. I've had way bigger screw ups in my own life and somehow the world kept spinning. Everyone acting like one deleted column means the whole system is about to crash needs to step back and breathe for a second. It's not the end of the world, it's just a dumb mistake you learn from and move on.

blair_nguyen1mo ago

Is it really that bad though? Deleting a column and having to redo four hours of work sucks, but it's not exactly the end of the world.