The Cascading Failure That Took Down Everything Our payment service went down for 3 minutes. No big deal, right? Except every service that called payments kept retrying. The retry storms consumed all available connections. Within 10 minutes, all 12 services were down. 3 minutes of one service failing became 45 minutes of total outage. Circuit breakers prevent this. How Circuit Breakers Work State Machine: CLOSED ──(failures exceed threshold)──→ OPEN ↑ ...