A breaker is an order block that failed, after which structure broke in the opposite direction. The zone stays in the same place but flips direction: a bullish block becomes a bearish breaker and the other way round.
A broken block on its own is not yet a breaker. Both events are needed, in that order.
How it forms
First there is an ordinary order block — the range of the last candle before the impulse that broke structure. Then price does more than enter it: it closes beyond the far edge. The block is broken.
After that, the next break of structure in the opposite direction is looked for. If there is one, the zone is reissued as a breaker with the reversed direction. If nothing followed the block's failure, the zone simply leaves the chart: a broken block with no sequel is not an object, it is debris.
From then on the breaker tracks its own state in the new direction: fresh, touched, mitigated. If it too is broken on a close, it disappears entirely — a zone never flips twice.
How it differs from an order block
The boundaries are the same — the high and low of the original candle, plus the body's edges stored separately. What differs is origin and direction.
A block marks where a move started from. A breaker marks where the previous move failed to hold: one side was expected here, then price went straight through and structure turned around.
Because of that a breaker has its own time origin. It starts not at the original block's candle but at the bar where the block was broken through.
Why there are not many of them
For a zone to reach breaker status a chain is required: an impulsive break with a significance shelf of at least two degrees, then a close beyond the block's far edge, then an opposing break of structure. Each link drops part of the candidates.
That is by design. Breakers found without the opposing-break requirement collapse into "any zone price went through", and the chart is littered with those.
What a breaker does not promise
Flipping a zone describes what happened: the block did not hold as support here and structure went the other way. The markup makes no claim that price will return to the breaker or bounce off it.