NET-PARTInfrastructure

Network Partition / Split-Brain

A network link between data centers or availability zones fails, causing clustered databases or stateful systems to fragment and potentially elect multiple primary nodes.

Root Cause & Remediation

Fiber cut, faulty BGP configuration, firewall misconfiguration, or severe packet loss on a cross-region VPC peering connection.

Remediation steps

1Verify connectivity between nodes using ping, traceroute, and checking firewall logs.
2Identify the quorum state of critical databases (e.g., etcd, ZooKeeper, Consul, PostgreSQL).
3If a split-brain occurred, stop traffic to the minority partition to prevent conflicting writes.
4Failover the entire workload to the healthy, majority data center.
5Perform a careful reconciliation of any writes accepted by the minority partition before it fenced.

DORA Risk Matrix

Typical classification

MAJOR INCIDENT

Likelihood: Low
Blast radius: Can cause total unavailability for strongly consistent systems or data corruption for eventually consistent systems.
CIF impact: Complete halt of transactional databases until quorum is restored or failover is completed.
Analyst notes: Network partitions in core banking systems frequently lead to CIF downtime > 2h and impact > 10% of clients, almost guaranteeing a MAJOR classification.

Security Context

Data Integrity Impacted: Records altered, corrupted or lost beyond recoverable state.

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