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@letshaveaword Round 13 Post-Mortem
Round 13 hit a critical bug: the winning word was NOTRE. When the first guess was processed, the database recorded a winner but the onchain payout failed silently; this created a “zombie round” that made the game completely unplayable for ~18 hours. Every guess hung and returned a 504 error.
During that window, 11 players independently found NOTRE and submitted it a combined 121 times. All were blocked by the bug.
After reviewing the complete Vercel server logs, I’m correcting the record. The previously recorded winner (
@rehankhn01) was actually the 9th person to submit NOTRE.
@coolhat was first... they tried 17 times over 1.5 hours, blocked every time.
@coolhat is the rightful Round 13 winner. I’ll coordinate with them to get their winning funds sent.
**All players who purchased guess packs after
@coolhat's winning guess have been refunded (see attached image)
Every player who found NOTRE and submitted it to our servers during the outage, in order:
1.
@coolhat — 17 attempts, all blocked
2.
@faroff — 29 attempts, all blocked
3.
@sekoweed.eth — 10 attempts, all blocked
4.
@jorja — 20 attempts, all blocked
5.
@tamey — 5 attempts, all blocked
6. @peyson.eth — 9 attempts, all blocked
7. @rilas00 — 1 attempt, blocked
8. @rend — 21 attempts, all blocked
9.
@rehankhn01 — 7 attempts, blocked
10. @daxexp29 — 1 attempt
11. @jmk — 1 attempt
What I shipped to prevent this in future rounds:
- 12s timeout + auto-retry on guess submissions
- Instant alerts when payout processing fails
- Zombie round detection every 30 min
- Admin recovery tooling
