| FM1 |
Single Point of Failure |
One component’s failure brings down the
system |
| FM2 |
Cascading Failures |
One failure triggers the next, producing
full outage |
| FM3 |
Unbounded Resource Consumption |
Memory, connections, threads consumed
without limit |
| FM4 |
Data Consistency Failure |
Different components disagree on the state
of the world |
| FM5 |
Latency Amplification |
Many small latencies multiply into an
unacceptable total |
| FM6 |
Hotspotting |
One node receives disproportionate
traffic; degrades or fails |
| FM7 |
Thundering Herd |
Many clients simultaneously retry,
overwhelming the recovering system |
| FM8 |
Schema / Contract Violation |
One side of a boundary changes; the other
side breaks |
| FM9 |
Silent Data Corruption |
Incorrect data propagates without
triggering alerts |
| FM10 |
Security Breach |
Unauthorised access to data or compute
resources |
| FM11 |
Observability Blindness |
System is failing but the team cannot see
where or why |
| FM12 |
Split-Brain |
Two nodes each believe they are the
primary, producing conflicting writes |