Explanation:
No distributed system is safe from network failures, thus network partitioning generally has to be tolerated.[7][8] In the presence of a partition, one is then left with two options: consistency or availability. When choosing consistency over availability, the system will return an error or a time out if particular information cannot be guaranteed to be up to date due to network partitioning. When choosing availability over consistency, the system will always process the query and try to return the most recent available version of the information, even if it cannot guarantee it is up to date due to network partitioning.
In the absence of network failure – that is, when the distributed system is running normally – both availability and consistency can be satisfied.