Error Handlers in Make.com: Your Automation Safety Net

When your automated workflow crashes at 2 AM, who's there to catch it?

According to Gartner, system downtime costs businesses an average of $14,000 per minute. For companies running automated sales outreach, customer onboarding, or lead nurturing campaigns, that number can skyrocket even higher. One broken automation can mean hundreds of lost opportunities, frustrated prospects, and a scramble to manually fix what should have been running smoothly on autopilot.

This is where error handlers become your automation safety net—the unsung heroes that keep your Make.com workflows running even when things go wrong.

What Are Error Handlers? (And Why Should You Care?)

Think of error handlers as the emergency protocols in your automation infrastructure. Just like a building needs fire exits and sprinkler systems, your workflows need contingency plans for when APIs go down, data formats change, or third-party services experience hiccups.

In Make.com, error handlers are specialized routes that automatically activate when a module encounters an error. Instead of letting your entire workflow crash and burn, error handlers catch the problem, contain the damage, and determine the next best action—whether that's retrying the operation, logging the error for review, or gracefully skipping the problematic step.

The best part? Error handlers don't consume operations in Make.com, meaning they won't increase your billing. They're essentially free insurance for your automation investments.

The 5 Types of Error Handlers Every Automation Pro Should Know

1. Break: The Emergency Stop

The Break handler immediately stops workflow execution when an error occurs. Think of it as pulling the emergency brake on a runaway train.

B2B Use Case: You're running a personalized video outreach campaign through Sixty Seconds AI. If your CRM API connection fails, Break prevents sending hundreds of generic, unmerged videos to prospects—saving you from a potentially embarrassing brand mishap.

2. Resume: The Optimist

Resume allows the workflow to continue executing subsequent modules despite the error, treating the failed module as if it succeeded.

B2B Use Case: Your marketing automation adds new leads to both your CRM and email platform. If the email platform API times out but the CRM update succeeds, Resume lets you continue the workflow. You can circle back later to sync the email platform manually rather than halting everything.

3. Ignore: The Selective Filter

Ignore catches specific, expected errors and continues the workflow without triggering failure alerts. It's perfect for scenarios where certain failures are acceptable or even anticipated.

B2B Use Case: When enriching lead data from multiple sources, some prospects won't have LinkedIn profiles. Instead of treating this as a critical failure, Ignore lets your workflow continue, simply noting the missing data point without raising alarms.

4. Commit: The Point of No Return

Commit saves all successfully executed operations up to the point of failure, then stops the workflow. It's ideal when you need to preserve partial progress.

B2B Use Case: You're processing a batch of 500 sales follow-up videos. If module 347 fails due to an invalid email address, Commit ensures the first 346 videos are saved and sent, rather than losing all that work. You can then troubleshoot the remaining batch separately.

5. Rollback: The Time Machine

Rollback reverses all operations performed in the current execution cycle when an error occurs, returning your systems to their pre-workflow state.

B2B Use Case: During a complex multi-step customer onboarding sequence, if the final payment processing fails, Rollback prevents creating the customer account, sending welcome emails, and triggering internal notifications—avoiding a messy cleanup of partial records across multiple systems.

Best Practices for Production Automation

Layer Your Error Handling: Don't rely on a single error handler type. Use Break for critical failures, Ignore for expected exceptions, and Resume for recoverable issues. This layered approach gives you granular control over how different errors impact your workflow.

Always Log Your Errors: Configure error handlers to send detailed logs to a centralized location—whether that's a Google Sheet, database, or monitoring tool like Sentry. You can't fix what you can't see, and historical error patterns reveal systemic issues before they become crises.

Test Failure Scenarios: Don't wait for production errors to discover your handlers aren't configured correctly. Deliberately trigger failures during testing by using invalid API keys, malformed data, or disconnected services to verify your error handlers respond as expected.

Set Up Error Notifications: For critical workflows, configure Slack, email, or SMS alerts when specific error types occur. Your operations team shouldn't discover a broken workflow when prospects start complaining about missing follow-ups.

Error Handlers + Video Automation = Bulletproof Outreach

At Sixty Seconds AI, we've seen firsthand how error handling separates professional automation from amateur hour. When you're running personalized video outreach at scale—generating hundreds of custom videos daily, syncing data across CRM platforms, and triggering multi-channel follow-ups—robust error handling isn't optional. It's the difference between a 99.9% delivery rate and a disaster.

Our Make.com integrations leverage sophisticated error handling to ensure your video campaigns never miss a beat, even when third-party APIs experience hiccups or data quality issues arise.

Ready to build automation infrastructure that actually works? Sixty Seconds AI helps B2B teams implement bulletproof video outreach workflows with enterprise-grade error handling, intelligent retry logic, and real-time monitoring. Because when you're personalizing outreach at scale, downtime isn't just expensive—it's inexcusable.