concept

Cascading failure

A self-feeding chain of failures in which the loss of a few components overloads or cuts the supply to others, making them fail too, which takes down further dependent components — an avalanche that can level a whole system from a single push. It is the mechanism behind wide-area blackouts and the collapse of interdependent networks. In a coupled system like Pandora's flora and fauna, a plague that kills only animals could force the entire plant network to cascade into collapse without a single tree being burned — the most insidious failure mode of a connected world.