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What Happened
A power failure at Google Cloud’s London data centre region took down banking apps, delivery platforms, postal services, and court systems across the United Kingdom on Tuesday, October 20, 2026. Google described the incident as a “power event” in one availability zone and said most services recovered within six hours.
According to Google’s service health updates, the incident began at 0608 GMT (7:08 am UK time) in the europe-west2-b zone of the company’s London region, known as europe-west2. By 1210 GMT, Google said it was “seeing the recovery of services for most workloads in europe-west2,” referring to its London data centre near Waltham Cross, north of London.
Which Banks and Services Were Affected
The Google Cloud outage hit some of Britain’s largest financial institutions. Digital bank Revolut, which serves more than 13 million UK customers, confirmed multiple services were unavailable, including ATM withdrawals, bank transfers, and bank card top-ups. A source close to the matter attributed the Revolut failures to the Google Cloud problems, according to reporting by Reuters.
High-street lenders Lloyds Bank and HSBC both confirmed customers faced issues with their banking services. Halifax and Bank of Scotland, part of the Lloyds Banking Group, also reported problems with their apps and online services. “We understand the root issues have been resolved, so we expect all our services to be back to normal soon,” Lloyds said in a statement on Tuesday afternoon.
HSBC said its customers experienced “difficulties accessing our services,” adding that it would “monitor the situation, which is also affecting other organizations.”
Beyond banking, the outage rippled through everyday services. Internet tracker Downdetector recorded hundreds of reports affecting the Royal Mail postal service, delivery firm DPD, property website Rightmove, the NHS app, and supermarket giant Asda. Remote court hearings in the UK were also stalled, and budgeting app Emma went offline from 7 am UK time, later saying the cause was a technical outage and not a security issue.
Google Cloud Outage: Which Cloud Products Went Down
Google’s status dashboard listed 38 products affected by the power event in the europe-west2-b zone, including Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Persistent Disk, Pub/Sub, Cloud Filestore, and Virtual Private Cloud. Google App Engine and BigQuery Data Transfer Service were also affected, according to Reuters.
The europe-west2 region has three availability zones, and only one of them lost power. Google’s incident timeline shows the outage ending at 1400 UTC, with a final update at 1403 UTC saying the issue was mitigated “for most of the customers.” Looker Studio was among the services Google noted were not affected. Cloud infrastructure has faced growing threats this year, including attacks on data centre facilities in the Middle East.
Banks Reassure Customers as Services Recover
A Revolut spokesperson said the bank had been “working to fix the issue since it was identified” and apologized “to anyone affected and for any inconvenience caused.” The spokesperson added: “We can confirm that all our customers’ money and data are safe.”
Google’s engineering team said it was investigating the root cause of the power failure, with no confirmed recovery timeline at the time. The incident has drawn comparisons to a July 2022 cooling failure in the same London region and renewed debate about concentration risk when critical national services depend on a single cloud provider’s zone.
As of Tuesday evening, Google said services were recovering for most workloads, though some users in the region could still face elevated errors and intermittent network issues.
Frequently Asked Questions
What caused the Google Cloud outage in the UK?
Google said a “power event” in the europe-west2-b availability zone of its London cloud region caused the outage, which began at 0608 GMT on October 20, 2026. The company was still investigating the root cause.
Which banks were affected by the Google Cloud outage?
Revolut, Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Halifax, and Bank of Scotland all reported disruptions to apps and online services, including ATM withdrawals, bank transfers, and card top-ups.
Was customer money safe during the outage?
Revolut confirmed that all customer money and data remained safe throughout the incident; only access to services was disrupted.
How long did the Google Cloud outage last?
The incident began at 0608 GMT and Google said most services had recovered by 1210 GMT — roughly six hours — with full mitigation confirmed by 1403 GMT.
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