A lossy fabric transmitting device includes a queue, a link transmitter to transmit packets from the queue, a trigger mechanism to automatically discard a packet contained in the queue in response to satisfaction of a packet dropping threshold and a discard counter to track packets being discarded from the queue. The discard counter has a failure detection threshold. The discard counter resets in response to the link transmitter transmitting a packet. Satisfaction of the failure detection threshold identifies the link transmitter as being immediately adjacent a failed link of a lossy fabric.