API Retry Logic: Why Exponential Backoff With Jitter Prevents System Collapse

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When API calls fail, blindly retrying without delay can turn a brief outage into a cascading system failure — a phenomenon known as a retry storm. A service handling 1,000 requests per second can see demand spike to 4,000 RPS if every client immediately retries three times during a five-second disruption. Experts, including Google's SRE team, recommend exponential backoff with random jitter to spread retry attempts and reduce server load. Developers are also advised to distinguish retryable errors — such as 429, 502, 503, and 504 — from non-retryable ones like 400, 403, and 422, where retrying wastes capacity. Additional safeguards such as idempotency keys, retry budgets, and circuit breakers are considered best practices for building resilient distributed systems.

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