Retry Storm

Definitions

1. A cascading failure where many clients simultaneously retry failed requests, overwhelming an already struggling service and preventing it from recovering — effectively turning a partial outage into a total one.

   In plain English: When a service stumbles and hundreds of clients all try again at once, they pile on and make the problem much worse — like a crowd all pushing toward the same exit.

   Example: "The database hiccuped for 500ms and every microservice retried three times instantly — the retry storm brought down the entire cluster for twenty minutes."

Related Terms

• Graceful Degradation
• Circuit Breaker
• circuit breaker
• Bulkhead Pattern
• Incident Commander
• Service Locator