A power-related outage at a Google Cloud data centre in London has disrupted the services of several UK banks and other businesses.
Google said its Cloud services experienced an outage in its europe-west2 region, which is based in London, after what it described as a “power event”.
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The incident began at about 0608 GMT on Tuesday, October 20, with Google reporting elevated errors and intermittent network failures affecting multiple Cloud services.
The disruption was particularly significant for digital bank Revolut, whose customers experienced problems with several services, including card payments, bank transfers, ATM withdrawals and account access.
Revolut said it was working to restore the affected services while assuring customers that their money and data remained safe.
“We can confirm that all our customers’ money and data are safe,” the bank said.
UK banking groups including Lloyds and HSBC also reported service difficulties.
Lloyds said its app remained available for customers to log in, although some users were experiencing problems with certain online services. HSBC, meanwhile, confirmed difficulties accessing its services.
The disruption extended beyond the banking sector, with user reports indicating problems affecting services including property website Rightmove, Royal Mail and delivery company DPD.
NHS England and other public services were also among organisations reporting issues, although the precise connection between every affected service and the Google outage was not immediately established.
Google’s service status page initially said its engineering team was investigating the incident.
The company later attributed the disruption to a power event within the europe-west2-b zone and said the power event had been mitigated. Google indicated that partial restoration of infrastructure services would follow, with remaining services expected to recover afterwards.
The outage has renewed concerns about the dependence of major financial and public services on large cloud-computing providers.
Reuters reported that UK regulators have increasingly focused on the risks created by financial institutions relying on external technology providers. Google Cloud was designated by the UK in July as one of four critical third-party suppliers to the financial sector.
For customers affected by Tuesday’s disruption, the immediate concern remained the restoration of banking and online services as Google’s engineers worked to resolve the incident.
Also read: UK unemployment falls to 4.7% ahead of budget
The full impact of the outage was still being assessed as services gradually returned to normal.
Victory Emmanuel is a journalist and contributor to Freelanews.com, covering news, business, and public affairs.


























