You can have comparable problems with microservices. Those BBOM problems you highlight occur when good development practices are ignored. So if good development

You can have comparable problems with microservices. Those BBOM problems you highlight occur when good development practices are ignored. So if good development practices are ignored under microservices, what can happen? Multiple, different services sharing the same database seems comparable to global state under BBOM. This shared database is a back channel. Furthermore, as the article describes, if you don't define your domain boundaries correctly then changes are not necessarily confined to a single microservice. As for blowing up a service three layers away, of course this can still happen. Just because you inserted the network between those layers doesn't mean that layer 1 can't produce outputs that triggers an edge case in layer 3 that wasn't properly tested. Similar failure modes are mostly all still there, it's just easier to violate certain good practices in a monolithic system. Maybe that means it happens more often in the BBOM, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen at all with microservices. I think the article broke this all down exactly right. Microservices pushes complexity into infrastructure, and sometimes that's good, but often you want that complexity in code and encapsulated in well-designed abstractions that are enforced by the language (like a good module system).