Hardening Third-Party API Timeouts — Twilio & Stripe

Release: v0.1.110
Control: ERR-10
Category: Error Resilience

Background

The sanctions screening platform makes outbound calls to several external services:

Service	Purpose
Twilio SMS API	Alert notifications to compliance users
Stripe SDK	Payment and billing operations
OFSI / UN / EU / OFAC	Nightly sanctions list sync

Prior to v0.1.110, the sanctions-list fetch calls already used AbortSignal.timeout() to cap connection time. However, the Twilio fetch call in src/lib/sms.ts and the Stripe SDK client in lib/stripe.ts had no timeout configuration. A hung or unresponsive connection to either service would block the request thread indefinitely until the remote closed the connection or the process was killed.

What Was Fixed

Twilio — src/lib/sms.ts

The raw fetch call to the Twilio SMS API now includes an AbortSignal:

// Before
fetch(twilioUrl, {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: { ... },
  body: params,
});

// After
fetch(twilioUrl, {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: { ... },
  body: params,
  signal: AbortSignal.timeout(10000), // 10-second hard limit
});

If Twilio does not respond within 10 seconds, the fetch is aborted and an AbortError is thrown, allowing the caller to handle the failure gracefully rather than waiting indefinitely.

Stripe — lib/stripe.ts

The Stripe SDK client is now instantiated with an explicit timeout option:

// Before
new Stripe(process.env.STRIPE_SECRET_KEY);

// After
new Stripe(process.env.STRIPE_SECRET_KEY, {
  timeout: 10000, // 10-second hard limit
});

The Stripe Node SDK respects the timeout option (in milliseconds) on all underlying HTTP requests it makes.

Why This Matters

• Predictable failure modes — A 10-second ceiling turns an indefinite hang into a fast, catchable error.
• Consistency — All third-party HTTP calls in the platform now share the same 10-second timeout policy.
• Operational safety — In high-load or degraded-network conditions, a stalled Twilio or Stripe call can no longer cascade into request queue exhaustion.

No Action Required

This is a behind-the-scenes resilience improvement. There are no changes to:

• Environment variables
• API request/response contracts
• User-facing screens or notification behaviour

The timeout values are hard-coded to 10,000 ms (10 seconds) for both services, matching the existing timeout applied to sanctions-list fetch calls.