If the network is split into AB and CDE, then only CDE will be able to reach a quorum. If a client is on the AB side of that split, no consensus algorithm could guarantee freshness on a read. LogCabin clients will continually retry until they can talk to a functioning leader (and clients can put a timeout on that) so that you get a guaranteed fresh read every time; other systems could choose to return a stale result right away instead. It's up to the implementation, but I strongly recommend people not do stale reads by default.