A major Google Cloud outage disrupted banking apps, websites, and public services across the UK on Tuesday, October 20, after a power-related incident affected one of the company’s London availability zones.
The disruption hit systems used for payments, money transfers, deliveries, property searches, and remote court hearings, exposing how a failure in one cloud region can ripple across much of the digital economy.
Google said the incident affected multiple services in its europe-west2 region, which serves customers from London. Although engineers began restoring services during the day, the outage lasted nearly eight hours before Google marked the incident as closed.
What caused the Google Cloud outage?
Google attributed the disruption to a “power event” in its europe-west2-b availability zone, one of three zones in its London cloud region. The incident began at approximately 6:08 a.m. UTC (7:08 a.m. British Summer Time) on October 20.
According to Google’s official Cloud Service Health dashboard, the incident affected 38 cloud products, including AlloyDB for PostgreSQL, Apigee, BigQuery Data Transfer Service, Cloud Run, and Google Kubernetes Engine. The company initially reported elevated errors and service disruptions while its engineering teams investigated.
The Register reported that Google prioritized restoring existing workloads, warning that customers might not be able to create new ones immediately. The company later reported recovery across affected services and closed the incident after seven hours and 52 minutes. Google has not yet published a full technical explanation of the underlying power event.
Revolut, banks, and public services affected
The outage quickly spread beyond cloud infrastructure. Reuters reported that British digital bank Revolut experienced a related service disruption, affecting functions including card payments and ATM withdrawals. Revolut said customers’ money and data remained safe.
Customers also reported difficulties accessing services from Lloyds, HSBC, and Halifax. Meanwhile, the disruption affected the video system used for remote court hearings across England and Wales, potentially delaying proceedings involving defendants appearing remotely.
Other services reporting or experiencing disruption included property platform Rightmove, parcel delivery companies DPD and Royal Mail, telecommunications provider BT, and retailer Screwfix. The precise impact varied between organizations, and not every reported service problem was independently confirmed as a direct consequence of the cloud incident.
The Guardian reported that the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) was engaging with Google and affected firms to understand the incident’s impact.
The outage highlights the risks of cloud dependence
The incident shows how a regional infrastructure failure can affect organizations that appear unrelated. Banks, retailers, delivery companies, and public services may all depend on the same cloud provider for parts of their digital operations, meaning a disruption can spread across multiple industries.
Cloud providers operate multiple availability zones to help customers build resilient systems. However, simply using a major cloud provider does not guarantee uninterrupted service. Organizations must also design applications to tolerate infrastructure failures, distribute critical workloads where appropriate, and test backup and recovery procedures.
The outage also comes as UK regulators pay closer attention to the concentration of critical financial services among a small number of technology providers. Reuters reported that UK regulators have brought Google Cloud and other major cloud companies under direct oversight as critical third-party suppliers to the financial sector. Google’s dashboard now lists the incident as closed. The company is expected to provide further technical details through its incident analysis.