Transient network failures, rate limit errors, and temporary server unavailability are facts of life when calling external APIs, and retrying with exponential backoff is the standard way to handle them gracefully. As the creator of CoreUI with 25 years of backend development experience, I implement retry logic in every Node.js service that calls external APIs, as a single unretried request failure can cascade into user-visible errors. The key design is exponential backoff with jitter — each retry waits longer than the last, and a random jitter prevents thundering herd problems when many requests fail simultaneously. Only retry idempotent requests (GET, PUT, DELETE) by default; POST requests need careful consideration to avoid duplicate side effects.