flowable/flowable-engine · error · FlowableException

Sending the event was interrupted

Error message

Sending the event was interrupted

What it means

In KafkaOperationsOutboundEventChannelAdapter.sendEvent, the Kafka producer send is awaited synchronously with .get(). If the waiting thread is interrupted, the adapter restores the interrupt flag and throws FlowableException("Sending the event was interrupted"). It indicates the publishing thread was interrupted while the Kafka send was in flight.

Solutions

1. Investigate who interrupted the thread (shutdown hooks, job timeout, thread pool shutdown) via the wrapped InterruptedException cause.
2. Ensure Kafka broker responsiveness so sends complete before timeouts/interrupts.
3. Retry the event send in a fresh transaction/job after shutdown completes.
4. Check delivery.timeout.ms / request.timeout.ms so slow sends fail deterministically instead of blocking until interrupted.

Example fix

null

try {
    outboundEventBus.send(event);
} catch (FlowableException e) {
    if ("Sending the event was interrupted".equals(e.getMessage())) {
        Thread.currentThread().interrupt(); // restore flag if needed and reschedule
        rescheduleSend(event);
    } else { throw e; }
}

When it happens

Trigger: The thread executing sendEvent (e.g. a process engine job executor thread) receives Thread.interrupt() while blocked on kafkaOperations.send(producerRecord).get().

Common situations: Application shutdown/timeout cancelling an async job mid-send; executor shutdownNow() while a Kafka publish is pending; long broker latency causing a send to outlive a job timeout.

Understand the failure class

Background: Request timed out: what client-side request timeouts mean across libraries (Request timed out, TIMED_OUT, APITimeoutError) — this error's family across 39 libraries.

Related errors

• Call was interrupted
• At least one of topics, topicPartitions or topicPattern…
• Cannot get process model: no current command context is…
• Channel definition cannot resolve as a String[] or a String
• Channel model in tenant has retry configuration but no…

AI-assisted analysis of flowable/flowable-engine@d6d39ce1c6 (2026-09-11). Data as JSON: /api/errors/197b30c87070e775. Report an issue: GitHub.

Appendix: source

Thrown at modules/flowable-event-registry-spring/src/main/java/org/flowable/eventregistry/spring/kafka/KafkaOperationsOutboundEventChannelAdapter.java:73

            Object rawEvent = event.getBody();
            Map<String, Object> headerMap = event.getHeaders();
            List<Header> headers = new ArrayList<>();
            for (String headerKey : headerMap.keySet()) {
                Object headerValue = headerMap.get(headerKey);
                if (headerValue != null) {
                    headers.add(new RecordHeader(headerKey, headerValue.toString().getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8)));
                }
            }

            Integer partition = partitionProvider == null ? null : partitionProvider.determinePartition(event);
            Object key = messageKeyProvider == null ? null : messageKeyProvider.determineMessageKey(event);

            ProducerRecord<Object, Object> producerRecord = new ProducerRecord<>(topic, partition, key, rawEvent, headers);
            kafkaOperations.send(producerRecord).get();
            
        } catch (InterruptedException e) {
            Thread.currentThread().interrupt();
            throw new FlowableException("Sending the event was interrupted", e);
        } catch (ExecutionException e) {
            if (e.getCause() instanceof RuntimeException) {
                throw (RuntimeException) e.getCause();
            } else {
                throw new FlowableException("failed to send event", e.getCause());
            }
        }
    }

    @Override
    public void sendEvent(Object rawEvent, Map<String, Object> headerMap) {
        throw new UnsupportedOperationException("Outbound processor should never call this");
    }
}

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