Comment by jongjong

Many outages can be summarized simply as "Too many clients attempting to perform an action at the same time." This is a common situation after a sudden crash or reboot... After recovery, sometimes clients try to reconnect to the servers so quickly that it crashes the servers again and the cycle repeats... Particularly problematic with WebSockets and other stateful connections; hence we use mechanisms like exponential backoff with randomization to spread out the load over time.