Surely there's a word for this, but I haven't learned it.

The problem with load balancing also shows up in employees mass quitting. It's the same queuing theory problem but I don't know the name of it.

Essentially, when you run a set of 'resources' near capacity, if one fails then the next most highly loaded one also goes past capacity and also fails. The work keeps getting foisted onto other units that also fail.

In retail, the beleaguered employee quits in frustration, and the three other people who can do the same onerous tasks the quitter did now find their jobs have gotten 33% worse with no extra remuneration for the insult, and one of them quits too. The last one or two simply refuse to do the task more than they used to, and the boss can't threaten them with being fired or reported for it because if they quit then the business ends. And still the whole thing goes off the rails.

That's why consistent hashing divides the work of one failed node and spreads it evenly over the remaining nodes, so that a spike is softened as much as possible instead of being concentrated on one or two fallbacks who also immediately fail. It's not that it's a great solution, it's that it's the least bad option amongst some pretty terrible ones.

The solution is to undersubscribe the hardware, which some beancounters hate. But most bean counters don't understand Queuing Theory.