n8n Webhook Timeouts: Stop Duplicate Runs and Botnet Spam
Last month, when I faced a sudden wave of 504 gateway timeouts and dropped webhooks on my automation cluster, I realized the massive gap between clean documentation and brutal production reality. When third-party APIs or upstream servers drop unexpectedly, default retry settings flood and jam queues. I learned the hard way that running automation without proper exponential backoff and dead-letter queues is like setting your own data pipeline on fire. Based on those scars, and on patterns that show up again and again in n8n's own community forum, this guide breaks down how to protect your infrastructure before the next network disruption hits. The timing matters too. Google just led a takedown of the XCPE botnet, a network built from more than 1.3 million hijacked Android TV boxes that a device manufacturer allegedly infected with malware before the units ever left the factory. Takedowns like that do not make scanning traffic vanish overnight. If your n8n instance faces...
