Our retry loop made an outage worse. The circuit breaker stopped the cascade.
The article discusses a recent incident where a retry loop exacerbated an outage due to high rates of 5xx responses from Anthropic. The author implemented a circuit breaker to prevent cascading failures and improve recovery time. The new system is designed to manage retries more effectively and avoid overwhelming the API during outages.
- ▪A 22-minute period saw Anthropic returning a high rate of 5xx responses, leading to degraded service.
- ▪The author's retry policy caused a backlog of in-flight retries, resulting in 18,000 wasted calls and 9 minutes of additional recovery time.
- ▪The implemented circuit breaker prevents runaway retries from turning partial outages into full ones.
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try { if(localStorage) { let currentUser = localStorage.getItem('current_user'); if (currentUser) { currentUser = JSON.parse(currentUser); if (currentUser.id === 3915555) { document.getElementById('article-show-container').classList.add('current-user-is-article-author'); } } } } catch (e) { console.error(e); } Mukunda Rao Katta Posted on May 21 Our retry loop made an outage worse. The circuit breaker stopped the cascade. #hermesagent #ai #llm #rust A few weeks back there was a 22-minute window where Anthropic returned a high rate of 5xx responses. Not a full outage. Degraded. Our agent service had a retry policy that backed off and tried again on 5xx.
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