[jlouis]

There is a subtle but important difference:

In a timeout situation, you know relatively little.

If the circuit tells you it is broken, you know that the backend system is deemed down and trying again right now is probably futile.

Each client for a server (on which the fuse runs) will be rather blind to the experiences of other clients. But the server, and thus the fuse, will know what happens to all the clients. This allows you to act globally on the server side. But this in turn empowers each client locally since it now also has global information.

[brianwawok]

So making a fuse global, say throwing it in your db, now means you can't have a fuse about the DB. Which may be okay, but seems in some ways less good than a local fuse.