Then again, a bad network design and lack of good maintainance will not work well for any network. Also the probability of 2 of 5 nodes failing during a given f

Then again, a bad network design and lack of good maintainance will not work well for any network. Also the probability of 2 of 5 nodes failing during a given failover time should be quite low for a production quality network. There seems to be a flaw in your second point. When the network partitions in a synchronous network, a node in any partition is not able to tell if a partition has actually occured or if the unreachable nodes are dead. The article points this out as one of the main problems Paxos tries to solve. Your given scenario actually puts the nodes in all in a vulnerable state where they are likely to make wrong decisions and become inconsistent