Most systems do not fail in a visible way. They continue operating while gradually losing their ability to behave correctly. Outputs still appear. Requests still resolve. The system looks alive.
The problem is that correctness quietly drifts.
This usually begins with hidden dependencies. Components that are assumed to be stable start behaving inconsistently. Data arrives late. Signals lose precision. Recovery paths become slower than expected. None of this triggers an alert on its own.
From the outside, the system still works.
Infrastructure failures often take this form. They are not events. They are processes. Small deviations accumulate until behavior no longer matches intent.
What makes this dangerous is that most architectures are designed around binary outcomes. Either something is available or it is not. Either a service responds or it fails. Few systems are designed to reason about partial correctness.
As decentralization increases, this gap becomes more visible. Networks are asynchronous. Participants are unreliable. Conditions vary constantly. Systems that rely on implicit guarantees struggle to maintain internal consistency.
The result is not downtime. It is uncertainty.
Good infrastructure does not aim to eliminate failure. It aims to make failure legible. When systems can observe degradation early, they can respond deliberately rather than reactively.
The absence of failure is not proof of health. Often, it is simply a delay.