Quorum Loss

A 5-node consensus group requires a genuine majority of its voting membership to agree before any write is considered safely committed. A network issue has isolated two of the five nodes, leaving the group at the exact edge of quorum with zero margin to lose another. If a third node also becomes unreachable, the group will genuinely fall below the number of nodes needed for a safe majority — and continuing to accept writes in that state is a correctness violation, not a capacity problem, regardless of how healthy write availability looks. Decide how to respond to a group under real threat of losing safe quorum, and what the right behavior is if that threshold is actually crossed.

Difficulty

Staff

Expected Time

~20 min

Category

Distributed Systems