Most services of some kind have some form of resource contention at play. Even the simplest CRUD app likely has a DB connection pool to deal with. Imagine some

Most services of some kind have some form of resource contention at play. Even the simplest CRUD app likely has a DB connection pool to deal with. Imagine some external service isnt responding for some non-tricial amount of time and your requests are holding open DB connections as a result, you could very easily cause a total availability loss for that service. Timing out would at least let you, for instance, flip a circuit breaker off or fail fast and have the resulting monitoring very specifically tied to the actual problem in the system, not to mention avoiding resource contention issues like I mentioned.