Episode Details

High availability is harder than simple arithmetic suggests. Serial components multiply failure rates, and enterprise SLAs promise financial discounts rather than infallible perfection. Looking into major cloud outages reveals a surprising culprit: automatic client retries. Without randomized jitter and backoff budgets, the very mechanisms designed to make software resilient turn small network hiccups into catastrophic cascading failures that overwhelm capacity. Key sources: • GitHub Status incident history, Sept — https://www.githubstatus.com/history • GitHub Status uptime history, Git Operations, Sept — https://www.githubstatus.com/uptime • Incident with Pull Requests, Git Operations and Issues, 2026-11-04 — https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/smtdswd1h2w4 Episode 6447 — myweirdprompts.com/n/6447 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/733756) Listen on Android: MWP FM Player — myweirdprompts.com/apk