Methods, systems, and devices for wireless communication are described that support beam failure identification and recovery is systems that may use beamforming for uplink and downlink transmission beams. A first beam and a second beam may be configured, and the second beam may be used to identify a failure of the first beam. Upon detection of a beam failure, a beam recovery procedure may be initiated in which an indication of a beam failure may be transmitted using scheduling request (SR) or uplink control channel resource. A base station in some examples may transmit an indication that one of a set of beams may have failed, and a UE may provide an indication of which beam of the set of beams failed, such as based on a received reference signal associated with one of the beams.