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Circuit breakers for downstream APIs: fail fast without amplifying outages
When upstream latency spikes, shedding load protects your gateway and preserves partial availability.
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reliabilityresilienceapi
Half-open probing
Gradually reintroduce traffic after cooling periods; jitter probes to avoid thundering herds.
Emit distinct error codes so clients can distinguish breaker trips from auth failures.
User-visible behavior
Return JSON errors with CORS headers even during breaker open states—never blank responses for fetch clients.
Surface Retry-After when you can estimate recovery time from upstream health signals.