LLM API Reliability in Production: What 10,000 Calls Taught Us About Failure Patterns

LLM API Reliability: The Reality Nobody Talks About If you have run more than a few thousand LLM calls in production, you have seen the pattern: things work perfectly in development, then fall apart under load. The Numbers Failure Type Rate Root Cause Timeout 2-5 percent Network congestion, provider throttling Rate Limit (429) 1-3 percent Burst traffic patterns Empty Response 0.5-2 percent Content filtering, model degradation Schema Violation 1-4 percent Model behavior...