
The Zombie Task Stuck in 'Scanning' — Vercel Deployment Protection Was the Culprit
There’s a moment when you’re idly scrolling a running service’s logs and your hand stops. That day, I hit that moment in the audit logs of A11y Check, a web accessibility auditing service. Two audits had been stuck “scanning” for hours. Not in progress, not failed — just stuck. This is what people call a zombie task: a job left in the queue, neither dead nor alive. This is the story of catching those two zombies, of two fixes I was sure of missing, and of finding the real cause only on the third try. To skip to the end: the culprit wasn’t my logic but Vercel’s Deployment Protection — or more precisely, my internal-call code that didn’t account for it. ...
