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It takes four vendors to summarize a phone call. One transcribes. A regex redacts. An LLM summarizes. Compliance reviews all three. Three retries per layer, three layers deep: 3³ = 27 requests from one failure. New edition, together with @AssemblyAI

GitHub, Aug 17: down 7h47m. One Istio sidecar hit its concurrency ceiling. The autoscaler watched app CPU and saw headroom. Server side was fixed in 4h. A VS Code retry bug ran the other 5, at 100k rps. Ended with a 403s. #SRE #DistributedSystems

GitHub's remediation list from Monday's outage has five items. Four are bug fixes. The fifth is "review retry limits and backoff behavior across gateways and clients." That's the only structural one, and scoping it as a review undersells it. Retry policy is a capacity decision that nobody owns. One team adds a retry to a flaky call. A client team adds retries because laptop networks are bad. Both correct in isolation. The sum is a load multiplier that only activates under stress. The autoscaling misconfiguration gets fixed in an afternoon. The retry architecture is still there waiting for the next trigger.

Retries aren't an edge case. They're the default. Your client times out, the network drops an ACK, mobile connection hiccups. The request goes out again. Without idempotency keys, that retry charges the card twice. Fix: client sends a unique key per operation. Server stores it, dedupes, returns the first result on repeats. Retry becomes a no-op. One header. That's the whole thing.