“Last write wins” conflict resolution methods based on time-of-day clocks (e.g., in Cassandra; see “Relying on Synchronized Clocks”) are almost certainly nonlinearizable, because clock timestamps cannot be guaranteed to be consistent with actual event ordering due to clock skew. Sloppy quorums (“Sloppy Quorums and Hinted Handoff”) also ruin any chance of linearizability. Even with strict quorums, nonlinearizable behavior is possible, as demonstrated in the next section.
