Partition tolerance

Partition tolerance is a quality attribute of distributed software. It is a property of fault-tolerant distributed programs that allows them to continue to operate even when network partitions occur.

A network partition is a situation where some nodes in a distributed program can no longer communicate with other nodes. The cause of a network partition could be network failures, software bugs, or other issues.

Network partitions have consequences for data consistency, which must be considered in the system design and are explained by the CAP theorem.