Architecture & practice·Incidents and what happens after
the backup had been failing silently for five months and you found out when you needed it.
Latent failure
Also calleddormant fault, latent condition
A fault already present in the system that has not yet produced a visible failure. Untested backups, misconfigured alerts, an autoscaler that would not actually scale, a certificate nobody renewed. They accumulate quietly and are only found by deliberately looking — which is what game days, restore drills and failover exercises are for.