Why is IRC distributed across multiple servers?
Just remember that &quot;netsplits&quot; exist in every distributed system, be it a chat app or a database. It&#x27;s just the CAP theorem. IRC has chosen to sacrifice C (consistency).<p>The only thing that changed in the modern times is that the P (partitions) are extremely rare in modern high octane cloud infrastructures. Also, modern solutions often decide to sacrifice A (availability), by returning an error saying &quot;we&#x27;re aware of the problem and we&#x27;re working on a solution&quot;. This is what happened quite recently when Google authentication went out and half of the internet went dark, while under the hood they had a simple out-of-quota situation on one of the replicas of their core authentication systems. The system was programmed to sacrifice A (availability) and reject all authentication requests.