Wonderful Fatal Circuit Breaker

Wonderful Fatal Circuit Breaker is a WordPress plugin designed to prevent site outages caused by malfunctioning or broken plugins. It addresses a limitation in WordPress’ built-in recovery mode, which only pauses a problematic plugin for the administrator who accesses the recovery link, leaving all other visitors exposed to ongoing fatal errors. By automatically monitoring PHP fatal errors on a per-plugin basis, this tool ensures that recurring issues do not bring down an entire site.

The plugin works by counting PHP fatal errors attributed to each plugin within a configurable time window. If a specific plugin triggers a set number of fatal errors—by default, five within ten minutes—the circuit breaker mechanism activates and the offending plugin is deactivated automatically. This approach keeps the site operational by removing only the problematic plugin rather than allowing it to cause a complete outage. The deactivation process is handled without executing the broken plugin’s deactivation hooks, as running faulty code could worsen the issue.

Administrators can designate certain plugins as protected if the site cannot function properly without them, such as shop, membership, or security plugins. Protected plugins are never deactivated automatically; instead, the system sends a notification, allowing a human to intervene and decide on the next steps. For both regular and protected plugins, persistent admin notices display error details, ensuring that administrators are aware of the incident and can take corrective action.

Wonderful Fatal Circuit Breaker also supports webhook notifications. Administrators can configure a webhook URL—such as for Slack, Discord, or n8n—to receive alerts whenever the breaker trips or a protected plugin continues to crash. The settings page allows customization of the error threshold, time window, webhook URL, and the list of protected plugins. eu brand. org.