Frontend Resilience (Part 2): Retries, Fallbacks, and Partial Data

Networks fail, APIs return errors, and data can be stale or partial. Designing for failure means: retry with backoff, show fallbacks instead of blank screens, and handle partial or cached data so the app stays usable. This post covers practical patterns.

Retry with backoff

For transient failures (network blip, 5xx), retry a few times with exponential backoff (e.g. 1s, 2s, 4s) so you don't hammer the server. Stop after N attempts or when the error is clearly not transient (e.g. 4xx validation error).