You're omitting what immediately follows: > The purist answer is “no” because partitions can happen and in fact have happened at Google, and during some partit

You're omitting what immediately follows: > The purist answer is “no” because partitions can happen and in fact have happened at Google, and during some partitions, Spanner chooses C and forfeits A. It is technically a CP system. > However, no system provides 100% availability, so the pragmatic question is whether or not Spanner delivers availability that is so high that most users don't worry about its outages. For example, given there are many sources of outages for an application, if Spanner is an insignificant contributor to its downtime, then users are correct to not worry about it.