Graceful degradation is a property of a computer system whereby it reacts safely and proportionately to erroneous or unexpected circumstances. For example, the TCP protocol is designed to allow reliable two-way communication in a packet-switched network, even in the presence of intermediate nodes which are misconfigured, imperfect, or overloaded. It does this by causing the endpoints of the communication to degrade gracefully in the presence of packet loss, duplication, reordering and corruption. The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the core protocols of the Internet protocol suite. ... In computer networking and telecommunications, packet switching is a communications paradigm in which packets (messages or fragments of messages) are individually routed between nodes, with no previously established communication path. ...

Data formats may also be designed to degrade gracefully. HTML for example, is designed to be forward compatible, by allowing new HTML entities to be ignored by browsers which do not understand them without causing the document to be unusable. In computing, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language designed for the creation of web pages and other information viewable in a browser. ... Forward compatibility is the ability of a system to accept input from later versions of itself. ...

Engineering: Graceful degration is a sought after design feature in fault-tolerant* Life-critical systems whereby the system's is implemented in such a manner that sucessive faillure of sub-components or external components reduce the level of capability of the system in a gradual manner, instead of having the system failling completely. The system thereby operate in a a reduce level of capability but is still functionning. Such systems normally have fail-safe mechanism to avoid dangerous states. A life-critical system or safety-critical system is a system whose failure or malfunction may result in death or serious injury. ...

• see Fault-tolerance