Modern distributed systems operate under partial observability, degraded telemetry, and asynchronous execution. While fault tolerance and consistency models address availability and state convergence under failure, they typically presume stable identity references. Identity continuity under interruption is treated here as an architectural invariant governing identity authority persistence and validated re-association across subsystems. An interruption-induced failure chain is characterized in which ambiguity in identity association propagates into structural divergence during recovery or reconciliation. Identity authority and persistent internal state are introduced as architectural constructs that decouple identity from continuous observation and condition re-association on validated correspondence. Framing identity continuity as an explicit invariant rather than an emergent property of recovery logic enables systematic evaluation of continuity assumptions in large-scale, heterogeneous distributed environments.
Joshua Zaris Goldman (Mon,) studied this question.