Webhook delivery failures from exceeding 3-second response timeout

Stripe marks webhook deliveries as failed when endpoint does not return 2xx status within 3 seconds. After retry exhaustion, webhooks are dropped, causing data inconsistency (e.g., Stripe records payment succeeded but application database shows unpaid). Root causes include synchronous processing of heavy operations (PDF generation, email sending, resource provisioning), database deadlocks from concurrent webhooks, or third-party API latency.

Decouple webhook ingestion from processing: (1) Verify Stripe-Signature header cryptographically, (2) Push raw JSON payload to message broker (Redis, SQS, RabbitMQ, Kafka), (3) Return HTTP 200 OK within 50ms, (4) Process business logic asynchronously via background workers (Celery, Sidekiq, BullMQ).