To get a real handle on this you need to look at metastability in electronic circuits. Essentially any asynchronous circuit with feedback even one as simple as

To get a real handle on this you need to look at metastability in electronic circuits. Essentially any asynchronous circuit with feedback even one as simple as a flip flop can fall into a stuck state such that it may never converge to a valid state (i.e. 1 or 0). The fix in electronics is to clock everything such that the setup and hold times are satisfied. The price for the clocking is a reduction in speed. In more general distributed systems, the fixes are going to be analogous. You'll need some mechanism for admission control and you may need it internally and externally. The article discusses not meeting the response time budget for the web page or app. With admission control you can tell if you're not going to meet that budget and implement a circuit breaker, rate limit and/or polling mechanism on the clients. That increases the complexity of the system but provides increased reliability. Building glitchy systems or circuits is an engineering failure. See here for the discussion of metastable circuits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability_(electronics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability_(electronics)