[jpatokal]

Two clarifications: the disks were not "unavailable", they had high latency (slow I/O) in one zone only (us-central1-a); and this affected only SSD PDs, not "regular" PDs. Per the SLA [1], it's "downtime" when PDs are completely unavailable for >5 minutes in at least two zones, and neither condition was met here.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/sla

All that said, people choose SSD because it's faster and has higher throughput, so SSDs not being fast is obviously a real problem for applications relying on this, and rest assured we are indeed doing whatever we can to avoid this in the future.

Disclaimer: I work in Google Cloud Support.

[pdeva1]

this is a typical Google Cloud Support response (I used to host on GCloud). Stretching the definitions to somehow get out of responsibility. If the SSDs have super high latency, then for most purposes they are indeed 'unavailable'. There is a reason why the user provisioned SSDs and not a regular disk.