How Uber Protects Against Retry Storms

Uber has developed a context-aware retry mechanism to prevent "retry storms"—cascading failures where retries against struggling services amplify load across entire dependency chains and trigger stack-wide outages. Traditional retry approaches apply retries uniformly regardless of error context, which during service degradation can exponentially increase traffic to already-failing services; Uber's solution uses shared infrastructure to intelligently control when and how retries occur based on error type rather than applying them indiscriminately.