Google Cloud says it has restored services following an outage at its UK cloud infrastructure that disrupted banks, businesses, delivery services and court hearings across the country.
The company reported problems with multiple services at its europe-west2 London cloud region early Tuesday. Google later said a power event at a third-party facility caused the disruption.
“We have resolved a disruption to Google Cloud services at a third-party facility in our europe-west2 cloud region due to a power event,” a Google Cloud spokesperson said on Tuesday evening. “Services have been restored.”
Google apologised to affected customers and said it would publish a detailed analysis of the incident on its service health dashboard.
Banks Among the Worst Affected
Revolut, Lloyds Bank and HSBC were among the major services affected, with thousands of users reporting problems on Tuesday morning. More than 1,500 reports involving Revolut were recorded during that time.
Revolut confirmed that some of its services had been disrupted by the Google Cloud outage but later said they were fully restored. The company said customer money and data remained safe throughout.
Customers of Lloyds Bank, Halifax and Bank of Scotland, all part of Lloyds Banking Group, also reported problems with online banking.
Lloyds did not confirm that Google Cloud caused its disruption but said the underlying issues had been resolved and services were expected to return to normal.
One Revolut customer, Rachael Ellen from Glasgow, told BBC News that she was unable to pay for parking because she could not access her money. She also could not see an incoming transaction from a relative.
Courts and Delivery Services Also Disrupted
The outage affected several other UK services, including Royal Mail, DPD and e-bike company Forest.
HM Courts and Tribunals Service also reported problems with the video platform used for remote hearings.
Google initially said several cloud products were experiencing elevated errors and intermittent network failures in europe-west2.
The company later traced the problem to a power event within europe-west2-b, one of the smaller zones inside its London region.
Small Businesses Report Financial Impact
The disruption also affected smaller companies that rely on cloud services.
Guy Baybutt, who works for family-run fresh produce business The Veg Box Company, told the BBC that the company could not access its website to download and process customer orders.
It was also unable to book parcels through DPD, putting deliveries at risk of delays, while customers could not place new orders.
Baybutt said outages of this kind could have serious financial consequences for smaller businesses that cannot easily absorb lost sales, particularly those dealing with perishable goods.
Outage Highlights Problems
The incident came exactly one year after an outage at Amazon Web Services’ largest cloud site knocked more than 1,000 websites, including UK banks, offline for several hours.
Large providers including Google Cloud, AWS and Microsoft Azure operate regional data centres that support vast numbers of websites, apps and online services.
Prof Feng Li, associate dean for research and innovation at Bayes Business School, said the latest outage showed how heavily modern economies depend on a small number of major cloud providers.
He said failures in large cloud systems are unavoidable, making the scale of disruption, recovery speed and availability of alternatives particularly important.
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