# Fallbacks and Graceful Degradation — Claude API / OpenAI API Basics

Source: https://www.geekswithgeeks.com/en/llm-apis/r-fallback

> Keep the product useful when the API is slow or down.

## Plan B for every dependency

Any external API will sometimes be slow or unavailable. Decide in advance what your product does: show a **clear message** and let the user retry; **queue** the request and notify when done; serve a **cached** or simpler answer; switch to a **secondary model or provider** (keep prompts and parsing provider-neutral, and test the fallback regularly); or hand off to a **human**. Use a **circuit breaker** so that after repeated failures you stop calling for a short time instead of piling up timeouts. Monitor error rate, latency percentiles and fallback usage, and alert when they move. A graceful failure is part of the feature, not an afterthought.

**Quiz:** What does a circuit breaker do after repeated failures?

- [x] Pauses calls for a while to avoid piling up timeouts
- [ ] Deletes the API key
- [ ] Doubles the retries
- [ ] Switches off logging

*Answer:* Pauses calls for a while to avoid piling up timeouts. Failing fast protects your system and gives the dependency time to recover.