Google Cloud Power Outage Disrupts UK Banks, Online Services
A power-related incident at a Google Cloud data centre in London disrupted banking and other online services across the United Kingdom on Tuesday. Revolut, Lloyds, HSBC and Halifax were among the affected financial institutions, while delivery and property platforms also reported problems. Google said its engineers were working to restore services, with customer funds and data reported safe.
A power-related incident at a Google Cloud data centre in London has disrupted online banking and other digital services across the United Kingdom, affecting several financial institutions and businesses.
The United States technology company said the incident began at about 06:08 GMT on Tuesday, causing elevated errors and intermittent network failures in its europe-west2 cloud region, which is based in London.
Among the affected financial institutions were digital bank Revolut and traditional lenders Lloyds Bank, HSBC and Halifax. Customers experienced difficulties accessing banking applications and online services, while some Revolut users were unable to make card payments, transfer funds, withdraw cash from automated teller machines or top up their cards.
Revolut confirmed that multiple services had been affected but assured customers that their money and personal data remained safe. The bank apologised for the disruption and said its teams were working to restore normal operations.
Lloyds Bank also acknowledged that some customers were experiencing problems with its application and online banking services. The lender later said its application was operational again and that it expected services to return to normal following the resolution of the underlying issues.
HSBC similarly confirmed that customers were having difficulty accessing its services and said it was monitoring the situation, which was also affecting other organisations.
The disruption extended beyond banking. Online reports tracked by Downdetector indicated problems affecting property website Rightmove, Royal Mail and other businesses, including delivery and web-hosting services.
The incident also affected public services that depend on cloud infrastructure, including the cloud-based video platform used for remote court hearings in England and Wales.
Google Cloud initially said its engineering teams were investigating the problem and working to restore availability. The company subsequently reported that the power-related incident had been mitigated and that services were recovering.
The outage highlighted the dependence of financial institutions and other organisations on third-party cloud providers to operate essential digital services. A disruption affecting a major cloud region can have consequences for multiple businesses simultaneously, even when those businesses operate independently.
Although the incident was centred in London, its impact could extend beyond the United Kingdom where applications and services rely on infrastructure hosted in the affected region.
The cause was described by Google as a power event, but the company had not publicly provided further details about the underlying technical failure at the time of the initial reports.
The disruption also renewed attention on the resilience of critical digital infrastructure and the need for organisations to maintain contingency arrangements when external technology providers experience service failures.
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