A new approach of systems and methods to support a hierarchical interrupt propagation scheme for efficient interrupt propagation and handling is proposed. The hierarchical interrupt propagation scheme organizes a plurality of slave interrupt handlers associated functional blocks in a chip in a hierarchy. When an exception or error condition occurs in a functional block, a slave interrupt handler associated with the functional block creates an interrupt packet as an interrupt notification and utilizes pre-existing input and output interfaces that have already been utilized for accessing registers of the functional block to transmit the created interrupt packet to a central interrupt handler through the hierarchy without running dedicated interconnect wires out of the functional block. The central interrupt handler then processes the interrupt notifications and provides a response packet to the interrupt notification back to slave interrupt handler that created the interrupt packet to configure or adjust the functional block accordingly.