Skip the Lock Entirely

A payout worker takes a distributed lock before paying a pending invoice, and the lock service has started returning intermittent errors that stall payouts. The row already has a status column with values pending and paid. What removes the need for the lock?

Read the row, UPDATE it, and compare the reported row count against the number of invoices still pending

Issue UPDATE payouts SET status='paid' WHERE id=$1 AND status='pending' RETURNING id, and send money only if a row came back

Open a transaction, SELECT the row, verify the status is pending, then UPDATE it and commit so the check and the write are atomic

Retry lock acquisition with exponential backoff and jitter until the lock service answers, so no payout is skipped