No, they haven't broken the CAP theorem. If the network were to partition badly enough, Spanner would lose its quorum and would become unavailable, at least for

No, they haven't broken the CAP theorem. If the network were to partition badly enough, Spanner would lose its quorum and would become unavailable, at least for guaranteed-consistent operations. In practice, a network partition bad enough to bring down something like Spanner is pretty rare. (I worked at Google for four years, and I can't recall such a partition occurring.) But in theory it's certainly possible.