What does "failover" mean?

An automatic switch to a secondary system on failure of the primary system, such as a means for ensuring high availability of some critical resource (such as a computer system), involving a parallel backup system which is kept running at all times, so that, upon detected failure of the primary system, processing can be automatically shifted over to the backup.

Failover

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1
An automatic switch to a secondary system on failure of the primary system, such as a means for ensuring high availability of some critical resource (such as a computer system), involving a parallel backup system which is kept running at all times, so that, upon detected failure of the primary system, processing can be automatically shifted over to the backup. countable, uncountable
"Horizontal scaling gives you some failover and flexibility that you normally cannot get with only vertical scaling."

Example

More examples

"Horizontal scaling gives you some failover and flexibility that you normally cannot get with only vertical scaling."

Etymology

Deverbal from fail over.

Related phrases

fail over

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.