Valid point, but I'm assuming that they never imagined 40-degree (outside) temperatures lasting multiple hours as a threat. Slough just got hit around 40.2 degrees, first time since records began.
It's also a bit of a stretch to call it "Google" when it's an Equinix datacenter. I know this is standard across all major cloud providers, and call me old-fashioned, but personally I'd prefer a bit more accuracy in naming of each region. Instead there is obfuscation. It's weirdly difficult to find a list of which datacenters correspond to which cloud region.
I hope there is a public postmortem that explains this. I have Cloud SQL instances with high availability enabled that have been down for over 5 hours with no workaround, when (according to docs) they should have failed over to the unaffected zones within minutes.
I think it's deceptive to say it's a single zone. We have VMs across three zones, but anything stateful on zone a is stranded, we can't get the volumes back. It's not just that the zone is down, it's that services are not easy to fail out of the impacted zone or move that's the problem.
Kind on implies regional isn't good enough to secure high availability. You need multi regional deployments. Good luck with that when the bill comes due.