The short answer: On the morning of Tuesday, October 20, 2026, a power failure inside Google Cloud’s London region (europe-west2) took down a swath of major UK online services. Revolut’s app and card payments went offline across Europe, Lloyds, Halifax, HSBC and Bank of Scotland reported service problems, and Royal Mail, DPD, Rightmove, Screwfix and even remote court hearings were caught in the disruption. Google blamed a “power event” in zone europe-west2-b, said the power issue was mitigated, and worked through the day to bring services back, with full recovery expected by 2pm BST.
What happened at Google Cloud’s London data center
Google Cloud’s status page recorded the start of the incident at 06:08 UTC, which is 07:08 BST. Multiple cloud services in the europe-west2 region, Google’s only UK cloud region based in London, began showing elevated errors and intermittent network failures. The failure was concentrated in europe-west2-b, one of the three availability zones in the London region. Zones exist precisely so that a hardware or power failure in one place does not take down the whole region, but on this morning the protection did not hold for every workload.
Google confirmed at least 38 products were affected, including Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run, App Engine, BigQuery Data Transfer Service, Cloud Filestore and the managed service for Apache Kafka. For the first two and a half hours the company offered customers no workaround; it later advised anyone still impacted to move affected workloads to another zone or region if feasible. In an update on its status page, Google said the power event was mitigated and apologized for the disruption. Full recovery of existing workloads was expected by 2pm BST, though Google warned customers might not yet be able to launch new workloads.
Who was affected by the outage
The damage was widest in financial services. Revolut was the hardest hit: the digital bank confirmed “multiple services” were disrupted, with customers unable to make card payments or transfers, withdraw cash at ATMs, use the trading platform or even sign in. It stressed that all customer money and data were safe. Downdetector logged more than 1,500 reports about Revolut within the morning, and the bank’s services were reported offline across Europe, not just in the UK.
Lloyds said its app was online and customers could log in normally, but acknowledged some customers were having problems with certain online services. Halifax, HSBC and Bank of Scotland also appeared on Downdetector with outage reports. Beyond banking, the disruption hit Royal Mail, the delivery firm DPD, property website Rightmove, retailer Screwfix and BT. HM Courts and Tribunals Service reported problems with its Cloud Video Platform, which is used for remote hearings in England and Wales; the Criminal Bar Association said barristers could not proceed with some trials and hearings. NHS England also reported service issues.
Why one zone failure broke so much
Cloud providers design each region with multiple availability zones so that customers running multi-zone setups can survive exactly this kind of failure. But many workloads still run in a single zone, either because they were never configured for high availability or because failover was never tested. When europe-west2-b went dark, everything pinned to that zone went with it, and services built on top of those workloads, like banking apps and delivery tracking, failed in turn.
Dr Amro Al-Said Ahmad, a computer science lecturer at Keele University, said the incident highlights what he called the dependency effect of modern cloud ecosystems: when a core cloud region fails, the impact spreads far beyond the directly affected services, because every product that depends on those services can suffer cascading failures.
What the outage means for cloud reliance
The timing is notable for UK regulators. Since July 13, 2026, Google Cloud has been designated a “Critical Third Party” under UK rules, along with AWS, Microsoft and Oracle, which puts it under direct oversight by the Bank of England, the Prudential Regulation Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority. The designation exists precisely because failures at a major cloud provider can now ripple through the banking system, and today’s outage is the first real-world stress test of that framework. Expect regulators to ask hard questions about how long it took for a power event in one zone to affect services across the wider region.
This was not Google Cloud’s only major outage in recent memory. Another outage last September affected several AI companies, although that one was attributed to internal infrastructure issues rather than power. The industry pattern is consistent: compromises and failures at a cloud or backup provider can reach deep into the systems of companies that rely on it. Revolut, meanwhile, has had a difficult month: its customer data was reportedly breached earlier in October, and it was the subject of a separate scam campaign before that.
What to do if you were affected
By the afternoon, services were coming back online. If your bank or another service was down, there is nothing to fix on your end: check the provider’s own status page, try again later, and avoid repeating payments that timed out until you can see them in your transaction history. Revolut has confirmed customer funds and data were safe throughout. For anyone building on Google Cloud, the lesson is the one from this morning’s status page advice: if uptime matters, run production workloads across multiple zones, and understand how cloud data center regions are actually built before you assume a single provider equals full redundancy.
Google Cloud London outage: frequently asked questions
What caused the Google Cloud outage on October 20?
A power failure, which Google called a “power event”, knocked out its europe-west2-b availability zone in London at 07:08 BST. The failure caused elevated errors and intermittent network failures across 38 Google Cloud products in the wider London region. Google said the power event was mitigated but did not immediately explain what triggered it.
Was my money at risk with Revolut during the outage?
No. Revolut confirmed that “all our customers’ money and data are safe”. The outage affected access and transactions: card payments, transfers, ATM withdrawals, the trading platform and sign-ins, but not the safety of funds.
When did services come back?
Google said the power issue was fixed and services were recovering through the morning, with full recovery of existing workloads expected by 2pm BST. By the afternoon most affected businesses were coming back online.
How long did the outage last?
The incident began at 07:08 BST and Google targeted full recovery by 2pm BST, which would put the main disruption at around seven hours for affected workloads. Some services reported problems outside that window.
Is this the first Google Cloud outage of its kind?
No. Another outage last September affected several AI companies, though that was blamed on internal infrastructure issues rather than power. Earlier, in April 2025, an Amazon-related cloud outage disrupted crypto exchanges and other services.