https://semikolan.me/tags/reliability/ Recent content in reliability on semikolan Hugo en Mon, 27 Jul 2026 21:19:11 +0530 https://semikolan.me/blog/a-year-of-reading-postmortems/ Tue, 02 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://semikolan.me/blog/a-year-of-reading-postmortems/ <p>I spent last year reading one public postmortem a week — outages from companies large enough to be forced into candor. I expected exotic failures. What I found was the same three or four stories wearing different logos.</p> <h2 id="the-retry-that-became-the-outage">The retry that became the outage <a class="anchor" href="#the-retry-that-became-the-outage" aria-label="Link to this section">#</a></h2> <p>The single most common shape: a small failure triggers automatic retries, the retries multiply the load, and the load turns a blip into a self-sustaining fire. The system&rsquo;s own recovery mechanism is the accelerant.</p>