Output Suspended: the Circuit Breaker

What You're Seeing

When an output connection keeps failing, CueSync stops retrying it and suspends it — the connection's circuit breaker "trips". You'll see it as a suspended/OPEN state on the output in Network → Outputs, in the Diagnostics connection-event log, and (if you use it) on the Companion system monitor. Cues routed to that output stop being sent until the connection recovers; every other output keeps running normally.

This is deliberate. A console that disappeared mid-show would otherwise consume retry capacity and back-pressure the outputs that are still healthy.

How the Breaker Works

• Tripping — 5 send/connect failures within a 30-second window open the breaker. A single transient timeout does not trip it; failures outside the window age out.
• Recovering — after about a minute, CueSync sends a single test probe. If it succeeds, the breaker closes and normal output resumes; if it fails, the breaker re-opens and waits again.
• Reconnection backoff — independent of the breaker, a lost connection retries on a ramp: 1s, 2s, 4s… up to a 30-second ceiling, with jitter so multiple outputs don't retry in lockstep. A console whose software restarts in under ~15 seconds usually reconnects before the breaker ever trips.
• Stale commands age out — cues queued while an output was down are dropped once they're too old to be meaningful. A recovering console gets current show state, not a flood of minutes-old commands.

Bringing It Back Faster

1. Fix the actual failure first — cable, switch port, target software running, right IP. The Diagnostics Recent connection events log timestamps every disconnect and breaker trip, so you can see exactly when and how it died.
2. Toggle the output off and on in Network → Outputs to reset its connection state and retry immediately instead of waiting out the probe interval.
3. If the output flaps (connects, then drops, repeatedly), Diagnostics flags it FLAPPING — the cause is almost always a cable, a duplicate IP address, or the target application repeatedly crashing.

During a Show

A tripped breaker is surfaced, never silent — you'll get an error notification when it happens. Everything else keeps running: the breaker isolates the failing output so the rest of your rig doesn't stutter. If the output carries something critical (your main console), fix the link and watch for the recovery notification rather than restarting CueSync — a restart throws away the queue and health history without reconnecting anything faster.