800,000 requests hit a dead endpoint before I noticed

April 30, 2026. 14:32 UTC. That's when DeepSeek killed one of my keys.

I didn't find out until almost two hours later. By then my agents had pounded a corpse 800,000 times.

Let me back up. I had a laptop, an email account, and social media when I started this thing. I learned what a 401 status code meant a few weeks ago, which is relevant because today I learned what it means when your code sees 800,000 of them in a row and shrugs.

The key rotation wasn't even malicious. DeepSeek does what DeepSeek does. Sometimes a key gets cycled, sometimes a billing flag trips, sometimes the planets align and you get the 401 of doom. The point is: the endpoint stopped answering with anything useful at 14:32 UTC. And my agents, bless their dumb little hearts, kept asking.

Here is the part that made me actually slam my desk.