This can either be a relatively short time or an eternity, depending on the upstream consequences. If that means holding a connection open for 60000 milliseconds while waiting for some downstream rpc to go through its backoff ritual, that's an eternity, and under load that connection pool will get exhausted quickly. So now a problem which should only affect maybe 1% of users has completely hosed everyone.

I've seen this happen multiple times. Someone designs some clever backoff strategy without considering how it fits in the context of the rest of the system. Hilarity ensues.

If you have something taking an entire minute on a computer, please ensure you implement it in such a way that no connections are actually held open for that entire minute.