{
  "status": "shipping",
  "advantages": [],
  "limitations": [],
  "supersedes": [],
  "supersededBy": [],
  "firstSeen": null,
  "lastSeen": null,
  "updated": "2026-11-09",
  "slug": "network-partition",
  "term": "Network partition",
  "aliases": [
    "Network partitioning"
  ],
  "definition": "A network partition is a communication failure that prevents message exchange between groups of nodes that may still be running.",
  "note": "Scope: A lost heartbeat does not prove that a peer has stopped or lost storage access. The communication failure and the enforcement of resource exclusion are separate observations. [pacemaker]\n\nFormal boundary: The CAP model permits arbitrary message loss between components. It cannot guarantee both linearizable reads and writes and eventual completion of every read/write request received by a non-failing node across all such executions. This availability definition is not an uptime percentage or a latency deadline. [gilbert-lynch]",
  "related": [
    "split-brain",
    "io-fencing",
    "failure-detector",
    "quorum-intersection",
    "linearizability"
  ],
  "citations": [
    {
      "id": "pacemaker",
      "title": "ClusterLabs: Pacemaker Explained 3.0, Fencing, sections 8.1-8.3 and 8.11",
      "url": "https://clusterlabs.org/projects/pacemaker/doc/3.0/Pacemaker_Explained/html/fencing.html",
      "accessed": "2026-11-09"
    },
    {
      "id": "gilbert-lynch",
      "title": "Gilbert and Lynch (2002): Brewer's Conjecture and the Feasibility of Consistent, Available, Partition-Tolerant Web Services",
      "url": "https://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~gilbert/pubs/BrewersConjecture-SigAct.pdf",
      "accessed": "2026-11-09"
    }
  ],
  "provenance": [
    "Source review of Pacemaker 3.0 and Gilbert and Lynch sections 2.1-2.3 and 3.1, accessed 2026-11-09. No cluster fault-injection experiment."
  ]
}