Most exponential backoff implementations I've seen have an upper limit, where the initial (fast) retries work around transient networking blips. My guess is th

Most exponential backoff implementations I've seen have an upper limit, where the initial (fast) retries work around transient networking blips. My guess is that a case like this you'd hit the backoff's upper bound pretty quickly, and, given the large volume of servers hitting a comparatively small metadata pool, experience exactly the same failure mode.