In physics, we sometimes say that an idea “breaks down”. What do we mean by that?
When a theory “breaks down”, we mean that it stops being accurate. Newton’s theory of gravity is excellent most of the time, but for objects under strong enough gravity or high enough speed its predictions stop matching reality and a new theory (relativity) is needed. This is the sense in which we say that Newtonian gravity breaks down for the orbit of mercury, or breaks down much more severely in the area around a black hole.
When a symmetry is “broken”, we mean that it stops holding true. Most of physics looks the same when you flip it in a mirror, a property called parity symmetry. Take a pile of electric and magnetic fields, currents and wires, and you’ll find their mirror reflection is also a perfectly reasonable pile of electric and magnetic fields, currents and wires. This isn’t true for all of physics, though: the weak nuclear force isn’t the same when you flip it in a mirror. We say that the weak force breaks parity symmetry.
What about when a more general “idea” breaks down? What about space-time?
In order for space-time to break down, there needs to be a good reason to abandon the idea. And depending on how stubborn you are about it, that reason can come at different times.
You might think of space-time as just Einstein’s theory of general relativity. In that case, you could say that space-time breaks down as soon as the world deviates from that theory. In that view, any modification to general relativity, no matter how small, corresponds to space-time breaking down. You can think of this as the “least stubborn” option, the one with barely any stubbornness at all, that will let space-time break down with a tiny nudge.
But if general relativity breaks down, a slightly more stubborn person could insist that space-time is still fine. You can still describe things as located at specific places and times, moving across curved space-time. They just obey extra forces, on top of those built into the space-time.
Such a person would be happy as long as general relativity was a good approximation of what was going on, but they might admit space-time has broken down when general relativity becomes a bad approximation. If there are only small corrections on top of the usual space-time picture, then space-time would be fine, but if those corrections got so big that they overwhelmed the original predictions of general relativity then that’s quite a different situation. In that situation, space-time may have stopped being a useful description, and it may be much better to describe the world in another way.
But we could imagine an even more stubborn person who still insists that space-time is fine. Ultimately, our predictions about the world are mathematical formulas. No matter how complicated they are, we can always subtract a piece off of those formulas corresponding to the predictions of general relativity, and call the rest an extra effect. That may be a totally useless thing to do that doesn’t help you calculate anything, but someone could still do it, and thus insist that space-time still hasn’t broken down.
To convince such a person, space-time would need to break down in a way that made some important concept behind it invalid. There are various ways this could happen, corresponding to different concepts. For example, one unusual proposal is that space-time is non-commutative. If that were true then, in addition to the usual Heisenberg uncertainty principle between position and momentum, there would be an uncertainty principle between different directions in space-time. That would mean that you can’t define the position of something in all directions at once, which many people would agree is an important part of having a space-time!
Ultimately, physics is concerned with practicality. We want our concepts not just to be definable, but to do useful work in helping us understand the world. Our stubbornness should depend on whether a concept, like space-time, is still useful. If it is, we keep it. But if the situation changes, and another concept is more useful, then we can confidently say that space-time has broken down.