Kafka All nodes die at same time. Now what?

Kafka’s guarantee about data loss is only valid if at least one replica is in-sync.

If all followers that are replicating a partition leader die at once, then data loss Kafka guarantee is not valid. If all replicas are down for a partition, Kafka, by default, chooses first replica (not necessarily in ISR set) that comes alive as the leader (config unclean.leader.election.enable=true is default). This choice favors availability to consistency.

If consistency is more important than availability for your use case, then you can set config unclean.leader.election.enable=false then if all replicas are down for a partition, Kafka waits for the first ISR member (not first replica) that comes alive to elect a new leader.

referer:http://cloudurable.com/blog/kafka-architecture-low-level/index.html