A replicated system is eventually consistent when replicas that stop receiving new updates converge to the same state after update propagation completes.

During propagation, different replicas may legitimately return different values.

Eventual consistency says nothing by itself about which intermediate values a client may observe, whether reads preserve causal order, or how concurrent writes are reconciled. Those are separate guarantees.

The model can reduce coordination on the critical path of reads and writes, which is useful when low latency or continued operation during disconnection matters more than immediate single-copy behavior.

Eventual consistency is therefore a convergence guarantee, not a synonym for “no consistency.”