What Is Graceful Degradation, and How Do Feature Flags Help Availability?

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What Is Graceful Degradation, and How Do Feature Flags Help Availability?

Graceful degradation is a design approach where a system maintains core functionality under partial failures or high load, serving users with reduced service instead of collapsing completely.

In other words, the system “bends without breaking”: it downgrades features or performance to keep running rather than failing outright.

Feature flags (feature toggles) complement this by acting as real-time switches for software features

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