Google Blames London Power Failure as Cloud Outage Freezes Banks and Courts

Google Blames London Power Failure as Cloud Outage Freezes Banks and Courts

A Morning Power Failure Knocks Out London Cloud Zone

Google Cloud's London region, known as europe-west2, began throwing errors at around 07:00 BST on Tuesday, October 20 (06:08 UTC). The company later traced the failure to a "power event" in one of the region's smaller availability zones, europe-west2-b, which cascaded into elevated errors and intermittent network failures across multiple services.

Seven Core Services Listed as Disrupted

The Guardian, cited by Cybernews, listed about seven affected products: Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run, Cloud Storage, App Engine, Cloud Filestore and Pub/Sub. On its status dashboard Google told customers its engineering team was investigating, apologised to everyone affected, and promised a further update at around 8 a.m. Eastern time, according to the Associated Press.

Revolut Cards and Cash Withdrawals Freeze

Digital bank Revolut was the worst-hit consumer name. A person familiar with the matter told Reuters the bank's outage was directly tied to the Google Cloud disruption. Revolut's status page showed most services unavailable or partially available, including card payments and ATM withdrawals. "We can confirm that all our customers' money and data are safe," the bank said on X. "We've been working to fix the issue since it was identified."

Banks, Deliveries and Court Hearings Caught Up

Lloyds, Halifax and HSBC customers filed hundreds of complaints on Downdetector, while DPD, Royal Mail, Rightmove, budgeting app Emma and e-bike service Forest also reported problems. England and Wales courts were hit too: HM Courts and Tribunals Service said its Cloud Video Platform, used for remote hearings, was down from around 10 a.m., and the Criminal Bar Association said trials and hearings could not proceed in many courts. The judge in a high-profile London criminal trial even noted "problems with Google" before confirming systems were back.

Mitigated by Midday, Restored by Evening

Shortly after noon Google said the power event was mitigated, with partial recovery of infrastructure services expected within 30 minutes. By 3 p.m. BST the company said the issue was mitigated for most customers, with only "a very small number" still affected, adding that it was "seeing the recovery of services and prioritising the recovery of existing workloads." On Tuesday evening a Google Cloud spokesperson declared: "Services have been restored." The UK's Financial Conduct Authority said it was engaging with Google and affected firms to understand the impact, after Britain brought major cloud providers under direct regulatory oversight as critical third parties to the financial sector in July.