Google Cloud Failure in London Freezes U.K. Banking Apps

Google Cloud Failure in London Freezes U.K. Banking Apps

London cloud failure freezes banking apps

Early on Oct. 20, Google Cloud's London region developed a major fault that quickly spread to U.K. banking services. Digital bank Revolut was hit hardest, with most services listed as unavailable or partly unavailable, including card payments, transfers, ATM withdrawals and sign-in. Lloyds, Halifax, HSBC and Bank of Scotland also reported login failures and payment problems on the same morning. Outage tracker Downdetector recorded more than 1,500 Revolut reports shortly after 8 a.m. U.K. time, rising past 2,000 by 9 a.m., while hundreds of Lloyds and HSBC users also filed reports. Beyond banks, Royal Mail, DPD, Rightmove, Screwfix and budgeting app Emma reported disruption, and the Cloud Video Platform used for remote hearings in England and Wales went down.

Google cites power event, apologizes, advises shift

On its service status page, Google Cloud said multiple services in europe-west2, the region it identifies as London, were seeing elevated errors and intermittent network failures. Its first message said the engineering team continued to investigate and apologized to all affected. Around noon on Tuesday it updated the wording to blame a power event in the europe-west2-b zone, adding that the power event was mitigated. It said partial mitigation to infrastructure services would be observed within the next 30 minutes, with remaining services to follow. Google advised customers to move work to another zone or region if feasible, with its next update due at noon U.K. time. Revolut said it was experiencing disruption affecting multiple services, had been working on a fix since the problem was identified in the morning, and confirmed that customers' money and data were safe.

Zone B power loss triggered cascading errors

The incident was concentrated in zone B of the London region. According to Google's status page, the power loss produced higher error rates and intermittent network faults across dependent services. The Register cited seven affected products: BigQuery Data Transfer Service, Cloud Filestore, Cloud Run, Google App Engine, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, Google Kubernetes Engine and Managed Service for Apache Kafka. Other outlets citing the same status page listed a wider set of up to 36 products, including Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage and BigQuery, reflecting updates during the day. The start time was given as 0608 GMT, described by the BBC as around 07:00 BST and by The Next Web as 07:08 U.K. time. Revolut's problems began at around 8 a.m. U.K. time, about an hour after Google's incident began. Google initially gave no cause before attributing it to power.

Millions faced declined cards and blocked transfers

Revolut was the clearest banking casualty. Euronews reported more than 80 million retail customers worldwide, including 13 million in the U.K., 6 million in Spain and 5 million in France. The BBC also reported more than 80 million customers worldwide. On Tuesday morning users in the U.K., Ireland, France, Spain, Romania and Germany reported they could not open the app, move money or pay by card. One shopper said a Revolut payment failed at a supermarket till, another said a card was declined at a motorway toll. Lloyds and HSBC users mainly reported app login and transfer faults. Courts faced a different risk: the video-link platform used by defendants, lawyers and journalists for hearings in England and Wales stopped working, threatening delays. Emma told customers it had been down since 7 a.m. London time because of the Google Cloud outage, stressing it was a technical outage rather than a security issue.

Partial recovery in 30 minutes, full fix unclear

Recovery is proceeding in stages. Google said power was restored and networking was being brought back, with partial relief for infrastructure services within 30 minutes and further services after that, but it gave no firm time for full restoration. Revolut said engineers were working to restore service as soon as possible, without naming a time. Journalists using the court video platform reported it began working again shortly after Google's noon update. In the near term, apps deployed only in London remain exposed to repeat faults, and Google's advice to shift to other regions underlines that risk. For customers, the practical lesson is to keep a second card and some cash, save transaction evidence, and watch for bank updates. For the industry, the fact that banks, courts, mail and retail were hit by one regional failure will renew debate over multi-zone and multi-cloud resilience.