Google Cloud's London Outage Knocked Out Revolut and UK Banks

A power event in Google Cloud's London zone took down Revolut, Halifax, HSBC and UK court video links for hours. Here's what broke and what devs should fix.

TheTechLane cover for the Google Cloud London europe-west2 outage that disrupted Revolut, UK banks and court video links

A power event inside one Google Cloud data centre zone in London knocked Revolut, Halifax, HSBC, DPD and the UK courts' video hearing platform offline for hours on Tuesday, October 20. Google says most workloads in its europe-west2 region recovered around six hours after the trouble began.

Here's what you need to know:

  • The incident began at 07:08 BST (11:38 IST) in Google Cloud's europe-west2 region, Google's only UK cloud region.

  • Google blamed "a power event" that caused an outage in the europe-west2-b zone.

  • 38 Google Cloud products were listed as affected, from Compute Engine and GKE to Cloud SQL, Spanner and Cloud Storage.

  • Revolut said "all our customers' money and data are safe", but some users reported cards being declined at the till.

  • Google reported recovery for most workloads at 13:10 BST (17:40 IST).

Timeline of the Google Cloud europe-west2 London outage on October 20, 2026, from the 07:08 BST start to recovery for most workloads at 13:10 BST

How the outage unfolded, per Google's status page (times in BST).

What Happened

The trouble started at 23:08 Pacific time on Monday, which was 07:08 on Tuesday morning in London, according to Google Cloud's official incident report. Google's first updates described "elevated errors and intermittent network failures" across multiple services in europe-west2, with no workaround.

The list of affected products is long. It covers Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, AlloyDB, Spanner, Cloud Storage, Persistent Disk, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, Memorystore, Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud NAT and VPC, among others.

At 04:12 Pacific (12:12 BST), Google named the cause: "Due to a power event we had suffered an outage within europe-west2-b zone. The power event is mitigated." It said services in that zone were unavailable, while other parts of the region could see elevated errors and network issues.

The fallout was very visible. According to the BBC's live coverage, Revolut reported a "service disruption affecting multiple services", Halifax said some customers couldn't use its app and website, and HSBC apologised to customers. Budgeting app Emma said it had been down "due to a Google Cloud outage affecting services in London since 7am" and stressed it was "a technical outage, not a security issue."

It went beyond banking. HM Courts and Tribunals Service said its Cloud Video Platform for remote hearings had problems. The Criminal Bar Association told the BBC that barristers "can not proceed with trials and other hearings."

The Telegraph reported that Revolut cards were declined at tills and that users of Lloyds, Barclays, NatWest, Nationwide, Royal Mail and DPD also reported issues. Not every company has confirmed that Google Cloud was the cause.

By 05:10 Pacific (13:10 BST), Google said it was seeing recovery "for most workloads". An earlier update warned that customers "may not be able to yet create new workloads" while Google prioritised existing ones.

Why It Matters

Cloud regions look abstract until one goes dark. As the BBC's Liv McMahon notes, europe-west2 is Google's only UK cloud region. That makes it a single point of concentration for a lot of London fintech, retail and public-sector software.

It's also not the first time. The BBC points out that the same region suffered a major outage in July 2022, when a cooling failure during a heatwave forced Google to shut down machines. There's no suggestion that cooling played a part this time.

The bigger issue is concentration risk. AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud account for almost two-thirds of global cloud infrastructure spending, according to Synergy Research Group figures cited by the BBC. When one provider's zone fails, apps that look unrelated fail together. Regulators already worried about banks' dependence on a handful of cloud providers now have a fresh case study.

What It Means for Developers

Google's own workaround was blunt: "If feasible, the impacted customer may try to migrate their workload impacted to another available location (zone or region)." That's much easier if you planned for it before the power went out.

Diagram comparing a single-zone deployment that failed in europe-west2-b with multi-zone and multi-region setups that keep serving traffic

One zone down: how three common deployment patterns fare.

  • Don't run production in a single zone. Use regional managed instance groups, regional GKE clusters and regional Cloud SQL or Spanner configs so a zonal failure triggers failover, not downtime.

  • Test the failover, not just the config. A standby you've never promoted is a guess. Run game days that kill a zone and time how long recovery takes.

  • Plan for "can't create new resources". Google warned new workloads might not launch during recovery. If your recovery plan depends on spinning up fresh capacity in the same region, keep warm spare capacity elsewhere.

  • Check data residency before you pick a second region. UK finance and public-sector teams often need data to stay in the UK, and Google has only one UK region. Know in advance which EU region you're allowed to fail over to.

  • Degrade gracefully. Card payments, logins and status pages should fail with clear messages and cached data instead of hard errors.

  • Watch your own dependencies. SaaS vendors, payment processors and auth providers may sit in the same zone. Map them. Third-party risk hides in more places than your own code, as our coverage of AI agents breaking into 100+ sites showed earlier today.

What's Next

Google typically publishes a preliminary incident report after a major outage, followed by a full analysis. The key open question is what the "power event" actually was, and why a single-zone failure caused errors elsewhere in the region.

Google hasn't said how many customers were affected or how long the europe-west2-b zone was fully unavailable. It also hasn't said whether it will offer service credits beyond its standard SLA terms. Expect UK regulators and MPs to ask banks about their cloud resilience plans in the coming days.

FAQ

What caused the Google Cloud outage in London?

Google says a "power event" caused an outage in the europe-west2-b zone of its London region. It hasn't released a detailed root-cause analysis yet.

Was any customer data lost or stolen?

There's no sign of that. Revolut said customer money and data were safe, and Emma called it "a technical outage, not a security issue."

Is Google Cloud working again?

Google said it was seeing recovery for most workloads in europe-west2 as of 13:10 BST (17:40 IST) on October 20. Check the official status page for the latest update.

Sources

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