Your n8n workflow ran successfully. The logs say 200. Your monitoring dashboard is green. But three days later, a customer asks why their data never arrived. The workflow executed — it just did nothing.
This isn't a crash. It's not an error. It's a silent failure, and it hides because everything looks right.
If you've built automation in n8n, Make, or Zapier, you've probably had this moment: a workflow that "succeeded" but produced zero output. Maybe you've debugged it. Maybe you're still looking for it. Let's talk about why this happens, structurally, and what actually triggers it.
The HTTP 200 Trap
Most workflow platforms return HTTP 200 to the caller the moment the workflow execution completes without throwing an exception. Completion ≠ success. A workflow can finish, exit cleanly, and have done absolutely nothing useful.
