Graceful Degradation
A system's ability to preserve its most important functions when part of it is impaired.
Plain English
Keep the essentials working even when some features fail.
In context
Graceful degradation intentionally reduces capability or quality to avoid complete service failure.
Example
“Search falls back to recent results as graceful degradation.”
When you'll hear this
- architecture review
- incident response
- resilience testing
Common misunderstanding
Degraded behavior must remain safe and clearly bounded rather than silently incorrect.
Commonly used by
Related terms
Updated: 2026-08-25
