How do Kotlin-based systems fail under real production load, and what are the common root causes?

Most Kotlin production failures come from concurrency misuse, blocking calls inside coroutines, and unbounded resource usage.

Kotlin itself is stable, but production failures arise from how coroutines and JVM resources are used. The most common failure patterns include blocking IO inside Dispatchers.Default or IO without proper backpressure, unbounded coroutine launches (especially via GlobalScope), memory leaks from long-lived references in ViewModels or services, and uncontrolled collection growth. At scale, even small inefficiencies in coroutine usage multiply into thread starvation, GC pressure, and latency spikes.