With application servers acting as the authoritative state of a user's current phonecall status, the api client wants a websocket connection to the shard with that user's state. It connects to one and is 302'd to the appropriate shard. It how has a websocket connection directly to the authoritative source to get notified of any state changes.

I forget exactly what the scenario was but the request was not being sent with credentials so a 401 was returned, which immediately prompted a retry with the credentials. I'd probably agree that this is covering up an issue that should be fixed.