Google restores London cloud after outage hits UK banks

Google said on Tuesday, October 20, that it had restored full service in its London cloud region after a "power event" disrupted several cloud services, according to Reuters. The outage took down large parts of digital bank Revolut and caused problems at Lloyds and other UK businesses during the morning.marketscreener.com

The incident showed how much of Britain's banking, delivery and public services runs on infrastructure in a single cloud region. Problems were reported at banks, parcel carriers and the court system's video-hearing platform.

What failed

Google, owned by Alphabet ↘ 1.11%, said problems in its europe-west2 region, which its website lists as London, began at 06:08 GMT, Dow Jones reported. Affected products included Cloud Run, Google Kubernetes Engine, App Engine, Cloud Filestore and Managed Service for Apache Kafka, The Register reported. The fault was in the europe-west2-b zone, one of three availability zones in the region.theregister.com+1

Shortly after noon, Google's service health page said: "Due to a power event we had suffered an outage within Europe-west2-b zone. The power event is mitigated," PA Media reported. Google suggested affected customers move their workloads to another zone or region. It apologized "to all who are affected by the disruption."aol.co.uk

Banks and services hit

Revolut said card payments, transfers, ATM withdrawals, currency exchange and stock trading were unavailable, according to Dow Jones. A person familiar with the matter told Reuters that Revolut's outage was linked to the Google Cloud problem. The bank said: "We can confirm that all our customers' money and data are safe."morningstar.com+1

Lloyds Banking Group said its app was online but that "some are having issues with certain online services this morning," and added that it was aware of similar problems at other organizations, The Times reported. Users also reported problems on Downdetector with Halifax, Bank of Scotland, HSBC ↘ 0.24%, NatWest ↗ 0.23%, Royal Mail and DPD, UPI reported. The BBC noted that it was unclear whether all of these firms were Google Cloud customers.upi.com+1

Rightmove was also affected. HM Courts & Tribunals Service lost its cloud video platform for remote hearings in England and Wales, and journalists said it started working again shortly after Google's noon update, according to PA Media. Budgeting app Emma said it was "down due to a Google Cloud outage affecting services in London since 7am," and called it "a technical outage, not a security issue," The Northern Echo reported.thenorthernecho.co.uk+1

Questions remain

Google has not said what failed in its power systems. Several affected firms had built real-time services on infrastructure that depended on a single London zone.