Google Cloud outage disrupts banking across Europe
Archived — this story has rotated out of today’s deck. It is kept here in full.
The gist
A Google Cloud outage in its London region disrupted UK banks including Lloyds, HSBC and Revolut.
It shows how much banking and public services rely on one provider's regional power.
Background
Google Cloud is the US technology giant's cloud-computing arm; its europe-west2 region is the London data-centre zone that underpins a large share of UK and wider European customer workloads. On Oct 20, 2026, that region suffered a "power event" in one of its availability zones (a separate power-and-network segment of the data centre), knocking out services that depend on it. The episode reopened debate about how heavily financial and civic infrastructure lean on a single cloud provider's regional power supply.
How it unfolded
- Oct 20, 2026 0608 GMTThe outage began in Google Cloud's europe-west2 London region, with elevated errors and intermittent network failures.
- Oct 20, 2026UK banks including Lloyds, Halifax, HSBC, Bank of Scotland and Revolut reported app and online banking disruptions; Revolut also saw problems with ATM withdrawals, transfers and card top-ups.
- Oct 20, 2026The budgeting app Emma said it was down due to the Google Cloud outage affecting London services since 7am; Downdetector showed hundreds of reports at other businesses including Rightmove and Royal Mail, and the NHS and England and Wales's court video system were also hit.
- Oct 20, 2026Google attributed the outage to a power event in the europe-west2-b availability zone and said full recovery was expected around 1300 GMT.
- Oct 20, 2026Google said engineering teams had restored full service availability for europe-west2 after the power event was mitigated, with recovery happening in stages.
Who’s saying what
- Official
- Google said its engineering team was investigating, attributed the outage to a power event, and apologized to all affected by the disruption.
- Caution
- The episode reopened debate about the dependence of financial and civic infrastructure on a single cloud provider's regional power supply.
- Party
- Revolut said customers' money and data were safe, while Halifax, Lloyds and HSBC acknowledged customer issues and said they were working to fix them.
Still unverified
Google said the full extent of the international damage and the cause of the outage in the London data-centre zone are still being analysed; there appear to be outages elsewhere in Europe but it is unclear whether they are connected, and some companies attributed issues to an unnamed third-party provider rather than Google Cloud.