Cascading Failures: When One Agent's Mistake Takes Down the Whole System (ASI08)

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 07:05:00 +0300

This is post #8 of the OWASP Agentic AI Top 10: What Builders on AWS Need to Know series.

A search tool starts returning errors. 2% failure rate. Nothing dramatic.

Your agent retries. Makes sense. But the agent’s retry logic lives inside a probabilistic reasoning engine that doesn’t understand backpressure. It retries immediately. And again. And again. Each retry burns tokens, adds latency, and puts more load on the already-struggling search service.

Step-Functions on Technodrone

Cascading Failures: When One Agent's Mistake Takes Down the Whole System (ASI08)