An interrupt storm is sometimes mistaken for thrashing, since they both have similar symptoms (unresponsive or sluggish response to user input, little or no output).
Most modern hardware and operating systems have methods for mitigating the effect of an interrupt storm.
Any operating system can live lock under an interrupt storm caused by such a fault.
[1] As drivers are most often implemented by a 3rd party, most operating systems also have a polling mode that queries for pending interrupts at fixed intervals or in a round-robin fashion.
This mode can be set globally, on a per-driver, per-interrupt basis, or dynamically if the OS detects a fault condition or excessive interrupt generation.
Interrupt rate limiting in hardware usually negates the use of a polling mode, but can still happen during normal operation during intense I/O if the processor is unable switch contexts quickly enough to keep pace.
Then, if there are no free DMA descriptors at the RX FIFO tail, the device drops the event.