API Integration Error Handler

Problem Description

A payments startup has built a checkout service that calls a third-party payment processor API. The API sometimes responds with HTTP 429 (Too Many Requests) during peak traffic, and other times with intermittent 503 (Service Unavailable) responses. The engineering team has noticed that their current error handling is too aggressive — it either gives up immediately on the first error or retries indefinitely, causing issues on both ends.

The team needs a Python error handling module that handles these transient failures gracefully. The module will be used by their checkout service and must correctly handle the situation where the same failure keeps recurring over a 24-hour window, eventually escalating to on-call engineers rather than silently retrying forever.

Output Specification

Write a Python module error_handler.py that implements error handling for the payment API integration. The module should:

• Handle transient API errors (rate limiting, service unavailable)
• Track recurring failures over time and escalate when thresholds are exceeded
• Include a TriageReport dataclass or similar structure for documenting what happened
• Include a brief README.md describing how to use the module

The module should be self-contained and importable (no external API keys or services required to import).