# On Metastable Failures and Interactions Between Systems

DevFeed: [On Metastable Failures and Interactions Between Systems](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/on-metastable-failures-and-interactions-between-systems-39550.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://charap.co/on-metastable-failures-and-interactions-between-systems/>)

Author: Aleksey Charapko

Published: 2025-12-24T21:26:49Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Aleksey Charapko](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/aleksey-charapko.md>)

Topics: [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/systems.md>), [retry](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/retry.md>), [clients](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/clients.md>), [servers](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/servers.md>), [Latency](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/latency.md>)

Tags: [clients](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/clients.md>), [fault-tolerance](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/fault-tolerance.md>), [latency](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/latency.md>), [load](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/load.md>), [metastabiilty](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/metastabiilty.md>), [other-thoughts](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/other-thoughts.md>), [performance](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/performance.md>), [retry](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/retry.md>), [server](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/server.md>), [signal](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/signal.md>), [state](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/state.md>), [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/systems.md>), [timeout](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/timeout.md>)

## AI overview

The article explains metastable failures as self-sustaining performance failures caused by positive feedback loops. It uses retry storms to show how overload, latency, timeouts, and client retries can reinforce one another, and examines how ambiguous timeout signals make recovery more difficult.

## Source excerpt

I've written about metastable failures before. The topic has been picked up by a few different teams since the, all analyzing metastable failures more, while I apparently has been slacking off... Anyway, Metastable failures are self-sustaining performance failures that arise in systems due to a positive feedback loop triggered by an initial problem. This positive [...]