Checkout Reliability Articles

Circuit Breakers in Payment APIs: Prevent Cascade Failures

A practical way to stop a payment incident from spreading is to isolate the dependency where one slow call starts blocking upstream flows. If you need to implement circuit breakers in payment APIs, start with the boundary that can prevent cascade failures in checkout, payouts, and reconciliation. We focus on choices you can verify: where to place protection first, how to roll it out, and how to keep degraded behavior clear. Microsoft's [circuit breaker pattern reference](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/patterns/circuit-breaker) is a useful baseline for `Closed`, `Open`, and `Half-Open` behavior.