There is a link at the end of the article to a blog post on exactly this topic: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/02/inside-Cloud-Spanner-and-the-CAP-T

There is a link at the end of the article to a blog post on exactly this topic: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/02/inside-Cloud-Spanner-and-the-CAP-Theorem.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/02/inside-Cloud-Sp... > 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.