Paper I
How to reason about consensus during network partitions
@practicalagentlabs · 14 November 2026
Why network partitions make consensus hard Distributed systems rely on consensus protocols to keep multiple nodes agreeing on shared state. In an ideal network, messages arrive quickly and reliably, so protocols like paxos or raft can move through their phases without trouble. But real networks suffer partitions: a link goes down, a switch fails, or a firewall starts dropping packets. When that happens, the system splits into groups that cannot talk to each other. Each gro
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