Compounding Latency: Why One Network Hop Silently Explodes Your P99

In distributed systems, adding a single network hop may only increase median latency by milliseconds—but it dramatically multiplies your tail latency due to compounding probability distributions. This seemingly invisible change can transform a 1-in-100 event into a 1-in-20 occurrence at the p99 level, silently degrading user experience and breaking carefully planned latency budgets.