Comment by lmm

> Rarely, clients from the outside will have a path into the minority partition but not the majority partition, but I don’t think I’ve seen that happen in nearly two decades of watching systems like this.

It happens any time you have a real partition, where e.g. one country or one office is cut off from the rest of the network. You're assuming that all of your system's use is external users from the internet, and you don't care about losing a small region when it's isolated from the internet, but most software systems are internal and if you're a company with 3 locations then being able to continue to work when one is cut off from the other 2 is pretty valuable.

> There are workloads that can tolerate a ton of asynchrony where being able to continue while disconnected is interesting, but they’re the exception rather than the rule.

I'd say it's pretty normal if you've got a system that actually does anything rather than just gluing together external stuff. Although sadly that may be the minority these days.