Thousands of webhook requests for a single order and overwhelming server

I’ve been in contact with Stripe and they say that Woocommerce generates all of the Stripe webhook requests

That’s not exactly accurate. The webhooks that Stripe sends to your site are, indeed, a result of various payment requests that are sent from your site to Stripe. You can configure which events webhooks will be sent for on your Stripe dashboard. We have a bit of documentation on that here: https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/stripe/#webhooks

Might a possible fix for the backlog of requests be to delete the webhook endpoint and recreate this?

No.

Thanks @wbrubaker. Any ideas how the problem would have manifested itself and where it may have originated from?

Incidentally, deleting the webhook and recreating it did appear to prevent the remaining requests from firing (they were due at 03:30 UTC and there are no corresponding entries in the NGINX access log). Any ideas why that would be?

Hey there!

Any ideas how the problem would have manifested itself and where it may have originated from?

This could have been due to some malicious code running or a plugin conflict or due to fatal error etc. It would be hard to pinpoint this without looking at the site, logs, etc. Do you see any fatal errors that coincide this incident?

Incidentally, deleting the webhook and recreating it did appear to prevent the remaining requests from firing (they were due at 03:30 UTC and there are no corresponding entries in the NGINX access log)Any ideas why that would be?

I am not certain that these are logged in Nginx by default. Do you see them in the stripe logs at WooCommerce > Status > Logs ?

Hi @simplysaru

Thanks for the response. There are no errors showing in the error log around the time of the first Stripe log entry. The NGINX access log does show more than 6500 entries similar to this one in a sub 30 minute window:

{STRIPE IP} - - [05/Jul/2021:07:17:50 +0100] "POST /?wc-api=wc_stripe HTTP/1.1" 200 5 "-" "Stripe/1.0 (+https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks)"

The first 450 succeeded before the web server was overwhelmed (after 3 minutes or so) and then the response code changed as the requests timed out or errored.

Any additional thoughts welcome.

Hi @bbceg

In view of the sensitive nature of things like Stripe logs, and because we’d really like to help get to the bottom of this, please contact us at WooCommerce.com > My Account > Support. You may need to create an account before you can access that page.

Please include a link to this forum thread, so that we can keep track of what’s already been done.

We will be able to help you further there.

Thanks @nicw that’s been done. I’ll leave this thread open for now in case we can supply a resolution for anyone else coming across this issue in the future.