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## Loss of a Read/Write Master

If you lose a host machine containing a shard's master, the shard will be incapable of responding to write requests, momentarily. The lack of write request response is so brief that it may not be detected by your client code. Only the shard containing the master is affected by this outage. All other shards continue to perform as normal.

In this case, the shard's replicas in primary zones will quickly notice the master is missing and call for an election. Typically this will occur within a few milliseconds after losing the master.

The replica nodes will conduct an election, and the replica in a primary zone with the most up-to-date set of data will be elected master. To be elected master requires a simple majority vote from the other machines in the shard hosting nodes in primary zones. Keep in mind that this simple majority requirement has implications if many machines are lost from your store.

Once a new master is elected, the shard will continue operations, reducing its read throughput capacity by one machine. As with the loss of a single replica (see the previous section), all write operations can continue as long as your durability guarantee does not require acknowledgements from all replicas in primary zones.

Your client code will not notice the missing master if the new master is elected and services the write request within the timeout value used for the write operation. However, we recommend that your production code include ways to guard against timeout problems. In the event of a timeout, your code should include a decision policy about what to do next. For example, your policy could:

- Retry the write operation immediately,

- Retry the write operation after a defined wait,

- Abandon the write operation entirely.