A mechanism provides autonomic recovery for a breakout appliance at the edge of a mobile data network from a variety of errors using a combination of hardware, software and network recovery actions. The recovery actions proceed upon a sliding scale depending on the severity of the problem to achieve the goals of minimizing disruption to traffic flowing through the NodeB while also maintaining an acceptable cost of ownership/maintenance of the system by automatically recovering from as many problems as possible. The error recovery functions within the breakout system hide the error recovery complexities from the management system upstream in the mobile data network. For critical, non-recoverable errors, the autonomic recovery mechanism works in conjunction with a fail-to-wire module to remove the breakout system in the event of a failure in such a way that the mobile data network functions as if the breakout system is no longer present.