A system and method are provided for improving recovery times in fallover conditions in a multinode data processing system by sending notification of the failure of a server node, which is acting as server for a client application running on a client node, to the client application. In the present invention, this notification is provided by the fallover node acting as backup for the server node. When a client application receives no response from a server for a long time, it assumes that the server has failed and initiates reconnection. The present invention speeds-up the reconnect initiated by the client application by having system level software proactively notify the client application about the server failure. This results in faster recovery for client applications.