Improve speed of GCP SQL Failover I've been trying out GCPs SQL high availability options. Is there a way to improve the fail over speed?

Attempting manual failovers through the UI takes literally over 5 minutes where mysql is completely unavailable.

I am using the smallest second generation 5.7 instances possible currently with no traffic hitting it.

It looks like it's actually stopping and starting instances. I'm having trouble seeing how this is an option for "HA" meaning minimal downtime.
There isn't anything you can do to improve the failover time, but you can add a read replica to have read access to your data while your instance is recovering. 

If you aren't locked down to MySQL, you should also try the Postgres version of Cloud SQL - it uses a faster method for recovery and from my personal experience is generally down for ~30-60 seconds. Each version has it's own page on HA, which talks about how they work: MySQL, Postgres