That Time a WooCommerce Race Condition Deleted Live Orders

I got a call from a client running a high-traffic shop. The panic in his voice was obvious. A customer had just emailed him, irate. They had an order confirmation, a credit card charge, the works. But when my client looked in the WooCommerce backend, the order was gone. Vanished. He checked Stripe—the payment was there, successful. But the order in his store? Total ghost. That’s the starting gun for a real nightmare scenario, and my gut immediately started screaming about a potential WooCommerce race condition.

My first thought was to blame the usual suspects. A failed webhook from the payment gateway, maybe? Nope, the logs were clean. An IPN issue? Everything looked fine. I started digging into their cron jobs, thinking some over-aggressive “database cleanup” plugin was deleting what it thought were abandoned carts. Another dead end. We spent a solid couple of hours chasing these ghosts. Here’s the kicker: the order wasn’t failing to be created. It was being created perfectly and then, moments later, getting deleted.

The WooCommerce Race Condition You Didn’t Know You Had

Turns out, the problem was a nasty little bug deep in WooCommerce core, fixed in the 10.3.3 dot release. In very specific, high-traffic scenarios, a customer’s session could hold onto a `draft_order` ID even after the payment was processed and the real order was created. A few moments later, a standard cart cleanup function would run, see that draft ID in the session, and delete the post associated with it—which was now the *completed, paid order*. Total data loss. Trust me on this, it’s the kind of bug that makes your stomach drop. The full technical breakdown is on the WooCommerce Developer Blog, which is worth a read if you’re into the nuts and bolts.

// This is a conceptual representation, not the literal patch.
// The core idea is to add a crucial status check.

// Old, dangerous logic:
$draft_order_id = WC()->session->get( 'draft_order' );
if ( $draft_order_id ) {
    // Just deletes whatever ID it finds. Ouch.
    wp_delete_post( $draft_order_id, true );
}

// New, safer logic introduced in the patch:
$draft_order_id = WC()->session->get( 'draft_order' );
$order = wc_get_order( $draft_order_id );

// The magic is here: Check if it's *still* a draft.
if ( $order && $order->has_status( 'auto-draft' ) ) {
    wp_delete_post( $draft_order_id, true );
}

And that wasn’t the only bomb defused in these “minor” releases. They also patched PayPal integration bugs that threw `AMOUNT_MISMATCH` errors if your order included fees and another messy issue where the system would try to run PayPal capture logic on orders paid through completely different gateways like Stripe. Minor stuff, until it costs you a sale.

So, What’s the Point?

The point is this: dot releases are not optional. They are not for show. They are often where the most critical, revenue-saving, data-preserving fixes live. Ignoring a release like 10.3.3 because it’s not a big, flashy `11.0` is a rookie mistake. The most dangerous bugs are the quiet ones that you don’t find until a customer is screaming at you. These patch releases are how you stay ahead of them. For real.

Look, this stuff gets complicated fast. If you’re tired of debugging someone else’s mess and just want your site to work, drop my team a line. We’ve probably seen it before.

When was the last time a “minor” update saved you from a major headache?