Quorum drift was logged this week in a Mars recovery copy during a standard verification cycle. The mismatch did not force promotion or shutdown, but it was large enough to trigger manual review.
The problem was not corruption in the narrow sense. State integrity remained intact. The issue was interpretive distance. Policy logs, routing assumptions, and trust markers no longer aligned cleanly with the Earth-side reference set, which left operators debating whether the copy remained merely delayed or had become substantively different.
This distinction matters because continuity plans assume disagreement can be measured before it becomes political. Quorum drift is the point where that assumption starts to look fragile. The copy still works. The argument is about whether it still counts as the same operational voice.