Had a similar experience with an I terror door that leads to our laundry room.
A previous owner put a bigger roof over the original roof and enclosed the back porch and stairs that lead to the basement.....so the old back porch and exterior stairs that led to basement are now interior stairs and the old back porch is the laundry room with giant windows.
That means the old back door off the kitchen is the interior door that leads to the basement.....and has the old back door tiny deadbolt.
After 30 yrs that mechanism went out and there was no way to fix it.....and for the life of me I could not get the pins out of the hinges for hours....and even when I did, the door was so tight in the frame I could not pop it free with the broken 1.5 Inc ling half the size of a dime, deadbolt still activated.
I had to damage the wall to get it out.
Old houses are more maintenance nightmares than old women (feel free to switch the ending when it suits your purposes during the next home maintenance nightmare.)
Our house isn’t that old. It was built in the 50’s.
But old houses can be bad. I dread any plumbing problems because old pipe can be so brittle it breaks in all kinds of hard to reach places no matter how careful you are.
I complain about too much regulation but some is necessary. I believe you’re required to have more than one way in and out of a house and it’s probably exactly because of what happened the other day.