Circuit breakers are useful because they shape failure. They are overrated when teams treat open and half-open states as if they automatically create resilience.
The breaker is only as good as the fallback
Failing fast is not a product outcome. It is an infrastructure behavior. The user experience depends on what the system can still do once the dependency becomes unreliable.
Half-open logic is not recovery by itself
The half-open state is simply a probe. If recovery logic is naive, the system can oscillate between optimism and overload while looking technically correct.
Diagram
Failure shaping under dependency degradation
Observability must answer a user question
Operators need to know not only that the breaker is open, but what customer-visible capability is currently degraded, for how long, and at what cost.
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