What is Circuit Breaker?
Turkish: Circuit Breaker
The circuit breaker pattern stops calls to failing dependencies temporarily, preventing cascading failures and wasted resources.
What is a Circuit Breaker?
A circuit breaker is a resilience pattern that temporarily stops calls to a dependency when that dependency starts failing. It works like an electrical breaker: interrupt the flow before the failure spreads.
In the closed state, calls go through normally. If error rate or timeout count crosses a threshold, the circuit opens and new calls fail fast or return a fallback response. After a delay, the circuit becomes half-open and allows limited test calls. If they succeed, it closes; if they fail, it stays open.
Where Is It Used?
When a payment provider, shipping API, search service, or reporting database slows down, the calling system can exhaust threads, connection pools, and request queues. A circuit breaker limits this cascading failure.
It is not a complete reliability strategy by itself. Timeouts, retries, rate limits, bulkheads, monitoring, and meaningful fallback behavior should be designed together. Poor thresholds can either block a healthy dependency too often or notice a real outage too late.
Circuit breakers are common in microservice architectures. In API integrations, they help protect user experience when third-party systems degrade.
Related Terms
An API is a contract that lets software systems request approved data or actions from one another through documented endpoints.
Chaos EngineeringChaos engineering tests resilience by injecting controlled failures and observing whether systems keep working under real-world stress.
MicroserviceMicroservice architecture designs a large application as small services that can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently.
Retry PatternThe Retry pattern handles transient network or service failures by repeating an operation with controlled timing and limits.