How We Accidentally Built a Fork Bomb in Go

When goroutine spawning goes unchecked

We didn’t set out to bring down production.
But in hindsight, the code we shipped might as well have been a fork bomb.

Not the kind you type into a Linux shell as a prank (:(){ :|:& };:), but a Go-flavored version: unbounded goroutine spawning that multiplied until the service collapsed under its own weight.

The Innocent Beginning

It started with a seemingly harmless retry loop.

We had a worker function responsible for processing jobs off a queue. If a job failed, we wanted to retry it in the background without blocking the main loop. Easy, right?

func process(job Job) {
    if err := doWork(job); err != nil {
        go process(job) // retry in background
    }
}

This looked clever.
It was simple.
It was also the start of our fork bomb.

The Explosion

Here’s what actually happened:

• Job fails once → spawns a new goroutine.
• That retry fails → spawns another goroutine.
• Both the old and the new goroutine are now live.