Google Cloud power failure blamed as major European outage continues to disrupt Revolut, banks and logistics

A widespread technical blackout that crippled fintech giant Revolut on Tuesday morning was caused by a major power failure at Google Cloud's primary London data centre in the europe-west2 region, Google confirmed.

The infrastructure breakdown cascaded across multiple sectors, impacting traditional retail banks, parcel delivery networks, real estate portals and legal services across the United Kingdom and continental Europe.

According to technical status updates issued by Google, the failure hit core cloud infrastructure, resulting in severe network errors and server offline events across several critical online services.

Google Cloud engineers confirmed that the root cause stemmed from a physical power failure at its primary London facility. In an official incident report released on Tuesday afternoon, Google stated that the underlying power issue had been mitigated and engineers were working to bring affected networking and workloads back online, with full recovery tentatively expected during the afternoon.

While power was restored to the site, tech platforms dependent on the provider face an ongoing rolling restart process as databases, security handshakes and application servers are brought back online safely.

Cross-sector disruption hits finance, logistics and public services

While Revolut was among the most visible victims - leaving international residents and tourists across Spain unable to execute point-of-sale payments or log into their mobile apps - the outage triggered disruptions far beyond digital banking.

Traditional banking institutions including Halifax, Lloyds Bank, HSBC and ING Germany reported intermittent customer log-in failures and transfer disruptions linked to shared backend infrastructure.

Major international courier services, including DPD and Royal Mail, experienced operational glitches and tracking portal delays due to cloud server failures.

Top property portal Rightmove, NHS public systems, and the HM Courts and Tribunals Service also reported disruptions, with remote court video links failing across England and Wales.

Systems recovery underway while partial outages persist

Revolut confirmed that engineering teams are progressively restoring core features as Google Cloud services stabilise. However, disruption remains partially ongoing, with card payments, sign-ins, bank top-ups and money transfers listed as partially unavailable across its network while backend infrastructure finishes reconnecting.

Revolut noted in an updated operational advisory that its engineering team continues to work alongside infrastructure providers to ensure all services are fully reconnected. Customers in Spain and across Europe may still experience intermittent card declines or delayed transfers while the rolling restart completes.

Financial institutions affected by the outage reiterated that customer accounts, balances and sensitive financial records were at no point compromised during the infrastructure failure.