What Is a Dead Letter Topic? When a record fails processing and retries are exhausted, you have two options: skip it (losing the data) or park it somewhere for inspection and reprocessing. A dead-letter topic (DLT) is that parking lot — a Kafka topic that holds records that could not be processed, enriched with error metadata headers. flowchart LR subgraph Main["orders topic"] R1["record: offset 42\n(bad data)"] end subgraph DLT["orders.DLT topic"] R2["