# The Thundering Herd Problem

DevFeed: [The Thundering Herd Problem](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/the-thundering-herd-problem-17852.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://encore.dev/blog/thundering-herd-problem>)

Author: Matt Boyle

Published: 2024-01-30T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Encore Updates](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/encore-updates.md>)

Topics: [distributed-systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/distributed-systems.md>), [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/incident.md>), [Latency](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/latency.md>), [Database](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/database.md>)

Tags: [database](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/database.md>), [distributed-systems](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/distributed-systems.md>), [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident.md>), [latency](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/latency.md>), [scale](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/scale.md>), [thundering-herd](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/thundering-herd.md>)

## AI overview

An account of a 2018 incident in which a feature launch sent notifications to customers and enabled a waitlist, triggering a thundering herd of requests. The resulting service crashes, high latency, and high CPU usage illustrate how retries and unreliable networks can overload an API and its dependencies.

## Source excerpt

Distributed Systems Horror Stories: Part Two