Consistency vs Availability Incident

A cross-region connectivity problem between Region A and Region B has made it impossible for the Distributed Data Service to guarantee both strong consistency and full write availability at the same time. Account balance changes must never be processed against stale or unconfirmed data — a balance write accepted by one region without cross-region confirmation risks silently conflicting with an independent write accepted by the other region for the same account. Product catalog views and writes may lag by a few seconds without customer harm. Decide, per operation category, how to handle the tradeoff while the connectivity problem persists, and how any backlog gets reconciled once it resolves.

Difficulty

Staff

Expected Time

~20 min

Category

Distributed Systems