# Correlated Failure **Domain:** Reliability / Distributed Systems / Ecology **Doc Type:** Canonical Risk Node **Maturity:** Foundational ## Definition **Correlated failure** occurs when supposedly independent components fail together because they share a dependency, defect, environment, operator or governing institution. ## Evolutionary Nexus Metapopulations persist only when habitat patches and recolonization routes are sufficiently independent. [[articles/The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley|The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley]] carries that lesson from checkerspot ecology into distributed intelligence. ## Continuity Context Copies across servers do not provide continuity resilience when all depend on one cloud account, software image, energy grid or revocation authority. Constitutional redundancy therefore requires institutional as well as technical diversity. ## Key Insight **Multiplicity is not redundancy when every instance answers to the same failure.** ## See Also [[wiki/Distributed Intelligence|Distributed Intelligence]], [[wiki/Metapopulation|Metapopulation]], [[wiki/Residual Sovereign|Residual Sovereign]], [[wiki/Energetic Sovereignty|Energetic Sovereignty]]