What Happens to Your Pipeline When the Source System Changes Without Warning

This article was originally published on the layline.io blog . Schema drift and upstream breaking changes are the number one cause of silent data failures — but most pipeline content focuses on infrastructure, not source system behavior The field that changed type on a Tuesday A team I know runs payment reconciliation for a mid-size e-commerce company. Their pipeline pulls transaction data from a third-party payment processor, transforms it, and loads it into their data warehouse. It's been runn