Complex systems can collapse from small initiating failures.
The 2003 North American blackout began with a sagging line touching a tree in Ohio and left 55 million people without power. Each protective trip shifted load onto the next component.
In practice
- A payment provider's certificate expires, retries pile up, the queue backs into the ordering service, and a shop that never touched payments is offline.
- A single overloaded switch reroutes traffic onto three others, which overload in turn, and the network fails outward from one component.
- Subject
- Risk & Reliability
- Essay
- How accidents actually happen