Backpressure prevents service overload by aligning work with processing capacity.

Services can fail under traffic spikes when they accept work faster than they can complete it, leading to resource exhaustion. Backpressure is a design approach that makes a system respond to its actual capacity rather than assuming it is unlimited. A common issue in Go is unbounded concurrency, where inexpensive goroutines are created without limit, causing cascading failures. Implementing controls, such as worker pools, can bound concurrency to keep services stable under high demand.