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Autumn’s SDKs include a fail-open mechanism that prevents your application from going down if Autumn is temporarily unreachable. When enabled, critical SDK methods return safe default responses instead of throwing errors.

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Why fail-open?

As a billing engine, Autumn sits in the critical path of your application. If your app calls check() to gate access to a feature, and Autumn is unreachable, that call would throw an error — effectively blocking your users from accessing your product. Fail-open ensures your users are never blocked by an Autumn outage. Usage events may be lost during the outage, but your customers stay unaffected.

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Behavior

Fail-open is enabled by default. When Autumn is unreachable (network errors, timeouts, or server errors returning 5XX status codes), the SDK returns safe defaults: Customer and entity operations, including customers.getOrCreate(), customers.get(), entities.get(), and entities.create(), propagate errors even when fail-open is enabled. Only check() and track() return fail-open defaults.
When fail-open triggers, the SDK logs a prominent error to your console so you’re immediately aware of the issue.

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When fail-open triggers

Fail-open activates when the SDK encounters:
  • Server errors — Autumn returns a 5XX status code (500, 502, 503, etc.)
  • Network failures — DNS resolution failure, connection refused, connection reset
  • Timeouts — The request to Autumn times out
Fail-open does not activate for client errors (4XX). If you receive a 400 (bad request), 401 (unauthorized), or 404 (not found), those errors propagate normally since they indicate a problem with your integration, not an Autumn outage.

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Configuration

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Disabling fail-open

If you prefer strict error handling and want all Autumn errors to propagate:

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Detecting fail-open responses

When check() fails open, the response will have allowed: true with empty values:

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Console output

When fail-open triggers, you’ll see this in your server logs:
Monitor your logs for this message. If you see it, check status.useautumn.com for ongoing incidents.

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SDK support