Circuit Breaker

A practical example

Example: your enrichment API starts timing out.

With a circuit breaker, after five consecutive failures the platform pauses calls for two minutes, routes affected contacts to a retry queue, and resumes automatically once a probe request succeeds.

What to evaluate before investing

• Ask whether the platform implements circuit breakers natively or whether your team must build them in middleware.
• Check if thresholds and cooldown windows are configurable per integration, since a shared default rarely fits all endpoints.
• Confirm you get alerts or dashboard visibility when a circuit opens, so paused workflows are not discovered days later.

Limitations and tradeoffs

Circuit breakers trade availability for stability: while a circuit is open, work is deliberately delayed, which can breach time-sensitive SLAs. Poorly tuned thresholds can also trip on transient spikes and pause healthy traffic unnecessarily.