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A circuit breaker is an architectural principle used to ensure that if a service fails or experiences a delay, it does not lead to a cascading effect in other services. It ensures stability in distributed systems.
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A circuit breaker interrupts calls to a failing or overloaded service and permits them again in a controlled way after a waiting period.
Michael Nygard prominently described the pattern in Release It! as protection for distributed systems. It applies the idea of an electrical breaker to network calls and became common in microservice architectures.
The breaker has three states: closed lets calls through, open rejects them immediately, and half-open permits a test. Error and time thresholds drive transitions and prevent a cascade of calls.
Calls are forwarded normally.
Calls are rejected during a protection period.
A limited test checks whether the service has recovered.
A circuit breaker protects dependencies and makes failures visible quickly. It does not replace timeouts, retry policies, or a business fallback strategy.
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