A cluster or group of cooperating systems may implement failure chain detection and recovery. The group may include multiple nodes and each node may include a group management services (GMS) module that in turn may include a group communications mechanism to detect cluster membership events. Each GMS module may maintain an identically ordered view of the current group membership. When a member of the group fails, the member that joined the group immediately after the failed member, according to respective join times, may be selected to perform recovery operations for the failed member. If a group member fails while performing recovery operations for another failed member, the next member in the group (according to respective join times) may be selected to perform recovery for that node and may also perform recovery operations for the original failed node as well.