diff --git a/.gitea/workflows/deploy.yml b/.gitea/workflows/deploy.yml
index 2dc654d..e5bc4f9 100644
--- a/.gitea/workflows/deploy.yml
+++ b/.gitea/workflows/deploy.yml
@@ -175,22 +175,31 @@ jobs:
             # Poll instead of guessing how long startup takes. The old fixed
             # "sleep 3" then single curl raced whenever startup ran long, and
             # failed the deploy with a bare "connection refused" on a service
-            # that came up healthy a second later. This exits as soon as the app
-            # answers, so a fast start costs nothing.
+            # that came up healthy a second later.
+            #
+            # Record the result and fall through rather than exiting early: this
+            # script is piped to the remote shell's stdin, so an "exit 0" in the
+            # middle can close the channel while ssh is still writing the rest,
+            # which surfaces as a broken pipe and fails the step even though the
+            # check passed. Only the very last statement may exit non-zero.
+            healthy=0
             for i in $(seq 1 60); do
               if curl -fsS http://127.0.0.1:8998/api/v1/health > /dev/null 2>&1; then
+                healthy=1
                 echo "✓ signalplatform deployed — healthy after ${i}s"
-                exit 0
+                break
               fi
               sleep 1
             done
 
-            # Still down after a minute: this is a real failure, so leave enough
-            # behind to diagnose it without a second deploy.
-            echo "✗ health check failed: no response on :8998 after 60s"
-            sudo systemctl status signalplatform.service --no-pager -l || true
-            journalctl -u signalplatform.service -n 80 --no-pager || true
-            exit 1
+            # Still down after a minute: a real failure, so leave enough behind
+            # to diagnose it without running a second deploy to go looking.
+            if [ "$healthy" -ne 1 ]; then
+              echo "✗ health check failed: no response on :8998 after 60s"
+              sudo systemctl status signalplatform.service --no-pager -l || true
+              journalctl -u signalplatform.service -n 80 --no-pager || true
+              exit 1
+            fi
           REMOTE_SCRIPT
 
       - name: Clean up SSH key