An agent called my payment API 50,000 times in 90 seconds. Here's what broke.

It was 2:47 AM on a Tuesday. My phone lit up with 47 alerts in under a minute. "Payment endpoint: rate limit exceeded" I opened the logs. What I saw made my stomach drop. Agent payments-batch-23a7 had called the /transfer endpoint 50,342 times in 90 seconds. Each call succeeded. Each call moved mone