Every system has a circuit breaker — a switch that kills the current before the wiring burns. You have one too. You've used it. You know exactly what it looks like. Describe what was running — the load on the wire — and this page will name the breaker you pulled.
The circuit breaker is not the disease. It's the only engineering your nervous system had available. The question was never "why did you pull it?" The question is: what kind of breaker do you want to install next time? One that doesn't cut everything at once.