On Tuesday morning (October 20th), Google Cloud’s data center in London, United Kingdom experienced a sudden service outage, causing major banks, digital financial platforms, and public service websites in the UK to be temporarily paralyzed. The impact even extended to cross-border users in other parts of Europe.
Google’s official statement mentioned that their engineering team has fixed the issue and all cloud services are gradually returning to normal operations.
According to the Associated Press, the outage began around 2 am Eastern Time on Tuesday (6:08 Greenwich Mean Time/7 am local time in the UK). Google’s official status page indicated that the Europe-west2 cloud region in London experienced a severe network failure and spike in error rates due to a sudden “power event”.
As the region serves as an important core node for Google Cloud in Europe, the data center failure triggered a chain reaction.
CNN reported that the UK digital bank Revolut was directly impacted, with services such as card payments, card top-ups, ATM withdrawals, and foreign currency exchanges temporarily disrupted. Revolut issued a statement on X (formerly Twitter) emphasizing the security of all customer funds and data, expressing apologies for the inconvenience caused.
Additionally, the network monitoring website Downdetector showed that financial institutions like HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds Bank, and Halifax experienced difficulties with online services or app logins.
According to Reuters, the outage further affected platforms like Rightmove, parcel delivery service DPD, Royal Mail, and NHS England.
However, Royal Mail clarified that physical mail and parcel deliveries were not disrupted.
Reuters reported that the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has intervened and contacted Google and affected companies to assess the damages. In July of this year, the UK government included Google Cloud, Microsoft, Amazon AWS, and Oracle in the direct supervision of key third-party suppliers in the financial sector.
Feng Li, Vice Dean of the Bayes Business School at City St. George’s, University of London, told CNN that this incident serves as a warning to the global economy, highlighting the deep reliance and vulnerabilities of modern finance and society on a few tech giants’ cloud infrastructure.