this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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And often the tipping point is invisible. Some small routine or service degrades, but outwardly everything still works fine... there is just more strain on the services and clients that use that service, causing them to slowly degrade over the next few hours, days, or weeks, which in turn puts more strain on the services that call those services... etc etc.
Until one day the system is so degraded major things start breaking. It seems like it came out of nowhere, but the initial failure happened weeks ago and has been cascading since then.
Once a system hits that point it's often not enough to just fix the initial problem because so much of the ecosystem around it has been thrown out of whack.
See the film Passengers for an example of cascade failures from systems trying to cover for each other.
The Expanse has a whole b-plot about an artificial ecosystem going through cascade failure in one of its arcs.