Google Cloud Outage Hits UK Banks and European Apps

Google Cloud suffered a power-related outage in its London region on Tuesday, disrupting Revolut, UK banking apps and a range of online services.

Google’s service-health page records the incident as starting at 07:08 BST on 20 October and ending at 15:00 BST. The company said a power event made services in its europe-west2-b zone unavailable, while other services in the wider europe-west2 London region saw elevated errors and intermittent network failures.

Revolut logged problems from 07:47 UTC, affecting sign-in, card payments, top-ups, transfers, ATM withdrawals, currency exchange and its website. Lloyds customers reported trouble with its app and online banking, while Halifax said some customers were also affected. Disruption reports also covered HSBC, Royal Mail, DPD, Rightmove, some NHS England-related services and court video links.

“A power event caused an outage within europe-west2-b zone. The power event is mitigated.”

Google listed a broad set of affected cloud products, including Compute Engine, Cloud Run, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, BigQuery and Virtual Private Cloud. Looker Studio was specifically listed as unaffected.

Google said it had restored full service availability and was prioritising recovery for existing workloads, although a very small number of customers could still be affected after the main disruption. The exact point at which every affected third-party service returned to normal has not been confirmed.

Technical failure, not a confirmed security incident

The incident was described as an infrastructure failure rather than a cyberattack. Budgeting app Emma said: “This is a technical outage, not a security issue.” Revolut said its customers’ money and data were safe, although that assurance applies specifically to Revolut.

The disruption may also have reached services outside the UK that rely on Google’s London infrastructure. Outages were reported elsewhere in Europe, according to AP, though it was unclear whether every reported European issue was linked to this incident.

Why the outage matters

This is the practical downside of shared cloud infrastructure: unrelated services can fail together when a single region has a serious problem. Google Cloud EMEA became one of four cloud providers placed under direct UK regulatory oversight for financial-sector resilience in July, and the FCA said it was engaging with Google and affected firms to understand the impact.