Circuit breakers and Ruby in 2025: don't break your launch—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog

Take a deep dive into what circuit breakers are, why you might need them, and the options you have in Ruby.It’s 4 AM. Your team calls …the app is down. Time to wake up, grab a coffee, and investigate. You uncover a trail of fails: the payment processor you integrate with started responding slowly → your checkout requests began timing out → users started frantically refreshing → and now your entire Rails app is unresponsive. This is a cascading failure, something more common than you might think. In this post, we’ll explore circuit breakers in Ruby, how they can prevent these cascading failures, and share a battle-tested open source Ruby solution so you can focus less on circuit breaker configs and more on business logic! .