Raft Consensus: Client requests when a leader is not elected
18:50 02 Jan 2026

I was reading into Raft consensus algorithm where the client requests are served by the leader node. In case a new election term begins, there is a brief period when the leader is not elected. We also know that the followers/candidates cannot serve the request to the client. What happens during this brief period where leader election is going on and the client sends a request to the leader who is no longer the leader? Are the requests simply dropped?

distributed-computing consensus raft