What happens if we stop retrying?

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The retry is the most confident line of code we write. Think about what it claims: the same request, sent again, will produce a different outcome. Sometimes that’s true — a dropped packet, a node mid-restart. But we don’t retry because we’ve established that. We retry because it’s easy and it usually looks like it works.

So, the thought experiment: what happens if we stop?

Take a service that’s slow because it’s overloaded. Callers time out and retry. Each retry is a brand-new request the service must also fail, which makes it slower, which causes more timeouts, which causes more retries. We have a name for this — a retry storm — and yet we keep writing the loop, because each individual retry looks reasonable. It’s the traffic jam problem: nobody thinks they’re the traffic.

Reliability on Werner Strydom

What happens if we stop retrying?