A power-related outage in Google Cloud’s London infrastructure left customers struggling to access banking apps and other online services on Oct. 20.
The disruption affected Google’s europe-west2 region and businesses including Revolut and Halifax. Google later confirmed that engineers had restored full service availability after the incident, which lasted nearly eight hours.
For IT teams, the immediate task is checking that their own applications and dependent services have recovered.
Power event disrupts London cloud services
Google’s incident dashboard lists the disruption as lasting 7 hours and 52 minutes, from 7:08 a.m. to 3 p.m. British Summer Time on Oct. 20.
They attributed the disruption to a power event in the europe-west2-b zone. Services there became unavailable, while some services elsewhere in the London region experienced elevated errors and intermittent network problems.
Affected products included Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud SQL and Cloud Storage. Google said Looker Studio was unaffected.
The company prioritized restoring existing workloads during recovery. An earlier dashboard update said a small number of customers remained affected; Google subsequently confirmed full service availability in a statement reported by Reuters.
Banking customers face payment and app disruptions
Reuters reported that the disruption affected financial firms and public-sector websites.
Revolut said multiple services were disrupted, including card payments and ATM withdrawals, while assuring customers that their money and data remained safe. Halifax also reported problems with online banking and its app.
The incident follows earlier examples of cloud failures reaching beyond the provider itself. In June 2025, a Google Cloud disruption affected services including GitHub, Mailchimp and Twitch.
A regional infrastructure incident can also interrupt businesses that use applications hosted there, even if those businesses do not manage cloud infrastructure directly.
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What IT teams should check now
Google’s restoration announcement is a starting point for recovery checks. Teams using the London region should test the application functions employees and customers rely on, including sign-ins, transactions and connections to other services.
They should also review failed jobs, queued requests and scheduled tasks. Before replaying interrupted operations, teams should check whether any completed without returning confirmation, particularly where retries could duplicate payments or other records.
The disruption also gives teams a specific failure scenario to test against their recovery plans. Geographic diversity and built-in redundancy can help reduce exposure, but teams should verify whether their applications depend on databases, storage or networking services in the same affected location.
Teams evaluating disaster recovery services should check which dependencies their arrangements cover, how failover is triggered and whether recent tests met the business’s recovery targets. Businesses using hosted applications should also ask suppliers to confirm recovery and identify any outstanding processing delays.
Google said it would publish an incident analysis after completing its investigation. Affected teams can compare that account with their own logs to establish what failed, how recovery performed and which changes deserve priority.
Read more: Data center outages are becoming less frequent but more expensive, raising the stakes for businesses reviewing their recovery plans after service disruptions.