# We turned off Pub/Sub and nobody noticed

DevFeed: [We turned off Pub/Sub and nobody noticed](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/we-turned-off-pub-sub-and-nobody-noticed-12060.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://incident.io/blog/we-turned-off-pub-sub-and-nobody-noticed>)

Author: Patrick Hamann; Mike Fisher

Published: 2026-08-11T13:56:40Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [The incident.io Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/the-incident-io-blog.md>)

Topics: [event driven](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/event-driven.md>), [Messaging](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/messaging.md>), [Publish-subscribe pattern](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/pubsub.md>), [Availability](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/availability.md>), [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/systems.md>), [Apache Pulsar](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/pulsar.md>), [Cloud](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/cloud.md>), [Google](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/google.md>)

Tags: [availability](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/availability.md>), [broker](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/broker.md>), [cloud](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/cloud.md>), [event-driven](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/event-driven.md>), [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident.md>), [incident-channel](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-channel.md>), [incident-management](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-management.md>), [incident-response](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident-response.md>), [messaging](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/messaging.md>), [outage](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/outage.md>), [post-mortem](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/post-mortem.md>), [production](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/production.md>), [scale](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/scale.md>), [slack](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/slack.md>), [slack-incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/slack-incident.md>)

## AI overview

This developer article explains how incident.io made its predominantly event-driven platform more resilient by adding a secondary message broker alongside Google Cloud Pub/Sub. It describes the role of message brokers and publish-subscribe processing, the risks of a single point of failure, and the successful production test in which Pub/Sub was turned off without affecting customers.

## Source excerpt

Our entire event-driven platform ran through a single message broker, which made it a single point of failure. So we added a second one. This is the story of building an event load balancer, the queuing theory behind it, and the final chaos test where we turned off Pub/Sub in production and nobody noticed.