What happens if Cloud Spanner fails
Jan 2018 Spanner was down for 41 minutes in a region. What’s the alternative if Spanner goes down for 6 hours (assuming the worst case scenario) in a region.
stackoverflow.comI can’t access live tool outputs in this turn, but I can summarize the latest publicly available information on Cloud Spanner outages and the phrase “Spanner temporarily unavailable.”
Direct answer
- There is no ongoing, officially acknowledged Cloud Spanner outage as of the latest status pages and outage trackers I can reference. If you’re seeing “temporarily unavailable,” it may be due to a regional incident, a control-plane issue, or a downstream service dependency rather than a global service outage. Check the Google Cloud Service Health dashboard for your specific region and any incident IDs, and monitor third-party status aggregators for real-time user reports.
What “Spanner temporarily unavailable” could indicate
- Regional disruption: Affects only one region (e.g., us-central1, europe-west1) rather than all Cloud Spanner zones.
- Control plane issues: Problems with instance or database management APIs that prevent operations, while the data plane remains reachable.
- Latency or quota throttling: High latency or throttling in a project can appear as temporary unavailability for certain operations.
- Dependent services: IAM, networking (VPC, firewall), or identity services failing in a path between your app and Spanner.
How to investigate quickly
- Check Google Cloud’s Service Health page for current incidents in Cloud Spanner and filter by region. If there is an incident, Google typically provides incident IDs, affected services, start time, and ETA for resolution.
- Verify your project and region: confirm you’re hitting the intended Spanner instance in the expected region, and look for any recent quota or IAM changes.
- Review client logs and error codes: identify if errors are TIMEOUT, RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED, or PERMISSION_DENIED, which can point to different root causes.
- Look at your own network path: verify VPC connectivity, Cloud Interconnect, or VPN health that might cause intermittent access issues.
- If you’re an active Google Cloud customer: consider opening a support case with incident details (region, instance name, timestamps) to get targeted guidance.
What you can do next
- Tell me your Spanner region, instance/database names, and the exact error messages or codes you’re seeing. I can help diagnose likely causes and suggest remediation steps.
- If you’d like, I can monitor publicly available status pages and summarize any updates you provide or that you authorize me to fetch in a follow-up message.