Scenario: A social media platform experiences rapid user growth, leading to performance issues with its database system. How would you address these issues while maintaining data consistency and availability?

Replicating the database across multiple regions helps distribute the workload geographically and improves fault tolerance and disaster recovery capabilities. It enhances data availability by allowing users to access data from the nearest replica, reducing latency. Additionally, it helps maintain consistency through mechanisms like synchronous replication and conflict resolution strategies.