graceful degradation
termcloudops cultureweb dev
Designing a system so that when part of it fails, the rest keeps working in a reduced way.
Rather than a full outage, a gracefully degrading service drops the non-essential (say, recommendations) and preserves the core (say, checkout). It is the difference between "a feature is missing right now" and "the whole site is down".
Also known as: graceful-degradation, fail soft, fallback