System design · interactive
Graceful degradation
A product page calls five services. Only one of them is essential. If the page fails whenever any of them fails, it's only as reliable as the weakest. With timeouts and fallbacks, a broken recommendations service just means no recommendations.
Brass desk lamp
$40.00
★ 4.6 · 1,204 reviews
7 left in stock
Add to cartHTTP 200 · 380 ms · amber = fallback content
Each failed optional service is replaced by a sensible fallback. The customer can still buy.
Timeouts + fallbacks
1 2 3 Stale cache, defaults, or simply hiding the section. Decide them in advance, not mid-incident.
Netflix shows generic rows when personalisation fails.
4
In production
Tools and technologies
Resilience libraries provide timeouts and fallbacks.
Not tied to one language — use these names when you search docs or design a system.