Fault tolerance
ability of a system to continue functioning despite erroneous inputs or faults within some of its components
Fault tolerance is the ability of a system to contain the propagation of faults (e.g. failed transistor, shorted connector, intermittent data bus). Faults may manifest as errors (e.g. bad data value, missing message) causing incorrect system state. Failure tolerant systems mask errors and maintain failure-free operation in the presence of one or more faulty components. This capability is essential for high-availability, mission-critical, or even life-critical systems.
Fault tolerance specifically refers to a system's capability to handle faults without any degradation or downtime. In the event of an error, end-users remain unaware of any issues. Conversely, a system that experiences errors with some interruption in service or graceful degradation of performance is termed 'resilient'. In resilience, the system adapts to the error, maintaining service but acknowledging a certain impact on performance.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Fault tolerance” as ability of a system to continue functioning despite erroneous inputs or faults within some of its components. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3140932. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fault tolerance” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.