CAN and it's automatic retransmit is actually pretty good example of how simple transient problems can quickly overgrow into global system failures. On typical

CAN and it's automatic retransmit is actually pretty good example of how simple transient problems can quickly overgrow into global system failures. On typical CAN the bandwidth headroom is small enough that when all colliding/failed telegrams would be blindly retransmitted the collision rate would skyrocket and thus only high-priority traffic will make any progress, and as on CAN priority and purpose is intrinsically linked together, from the global point of view nothing will make progress. That's why most CAN controllers have configurable retransmit behavior per packet (drop/retry/raise error and application deal with that) and partially why today's cars have multiple CAN buses.