When Your Safety Net Becomes a Noose: Mastering Retry Storms

You know this story.

Your payment system hiccups. Maybe two seconds of slowness. Perhaps a brief network flutter. Nothing apocalyptic. Then checkout begins crumbling. Queues balloon. Everything feels sluggish, and somehow the damage spreads far beyond the initial problem.

I used to blame unreliable payment providers. Sometimes they deserve it. But here's the uncomfortable truth that took me years to accept: we transform minor upstream issues into catastrophic failures, and we do it with the very mechanism designed to save us, retries.

The typical failure mode looks innocent at first. Default retry behavior seems reasonable. No jitter? No problem, we think. Multiple layers retrying simultaneously? Sure, redundancy is good. Infinite attempts? Well, persistence pays off, right? Wrong. Dead wrong. One timeout spawns a flood of desperate requests, your own services become the distributed denial-of-service attacker you feared, and suddenly, rate limits trigger, thread pools saturate, and the entire checkout flow collapses like a house of cards in a windstorm.

Treat retries as a production safety feature requiring strict governance, not a convenience you sprinkle everywhere like salt.

From: "Retries improve reliability, so add them whenever something fails."
To: "Retries generate load. Budget them carefully, jitter them religiously, and cut them off decisively."

Retries can be good. Absolutely. I'm not anti-retry. I'm anti-unconscious retry.

Consider the mathematics of disaster. If every timeout spawns three additional requests, and those requests also timeout because the dependency is already struggling, you're actively increasing traffic precisely when the system can least handle it. That's the death spiral. Circuit breakers exist to sever that spiral before it strangles your infrastructure. Jitter exists to prevent synchronized thundering herds, where thousands of clients retry at identical milliseconds, creating devastating traffic spikes that no system can absorb.

Two rules that keep you honest:

Only one layer owns retries for any given external call. Everyone else either fails fast or propagates errors upstream without heroics.

Retry budgets are part of your SLO budget, and if you spend them freely during peacetime, you'll burn through your entire error budget when the next incident strikes and you need that cushion most.