Problem · seen at 1 company
Retry-amplified overload
The dependency is already drowning, and every client's retry pours in more water.
The wall
When failures are caused by overload, clients retrying to improve their own odds spend the struggling dependency's scarce capacity, multiplying load at the worst moment — and naive backoff does not fix it, because clients that failed together retry in sync.
Same wall, 1 system
Amazon (AWS)
Amazon Builders' Library
Retries amplify overload by spending the server's scarce capacity — and backoff alone can't stop it. Read the breakdown →