What is a circuit breaker..?

[courajs]

So this is a circuit breaker for Erlang, that's pretty clear. I assume it has something to do with limiting retries, or debouncing requests, or something. It sounds like circuit breaker is probably a standard term in the Erlang community, but I'm new and don't really understand.

What does it do, and what is it usually used for?

[courajs]

omg I just needed to scroll down in the readme...
Seeing the changelog made me think it was the bottom of the file, those are pretty often put at the end.