What we learned operating auth for 900+ APIs

A May 2025 Nango bug prevented newly refreshed credentials from being saved, causing hundreds of connections to lose access when providers that rotate refresh tokens invalidated the old tokens; although reverted within two hours, affected users had to reauthorize. The incident highlighted that OAuth implementations vary substantially across providers, with differences in token rotation, duplicate-refresh handling, expiration reporting, token lifetimes, error formats, and undocumented behavior making generic credential management unreliable. Nango responded by prioritizing persistence of replacement tokens, serializing refreshes with distributed locks, adding provider-specific refresh buffers and credential-validation heuristics, monitoring anomalies, and regularly exercising stale credentials. As its registry grew from roughly 400 to more than 900 APIs, the company found that auth-breaking provider changes are common and often discovered through failures or customer reports, while incomplete documentation and inaccessible testing environments sometimes require mocks, workarounds, or community-sourced solutions. It argues that API providers could reduce integration failures by consistently reporting token expiry, clearly documenting rotation and revocation policies, returning meaningful non-200 errors, versioning and announcing auth changes, maintaining accurate public documentation, and offering accessible test environments.

No tracked trend matches for this post yet.

Use this post, company, and trend context to find content marketing opportunities, perform competitive analysis, or address product feature gaps via the Plushcap MCP server or the Plushcap API.