Google Cloud London outage disrupts UK banks, Royal Mail, Revolut

A power outage at Google Cloud's London data center disrupted services across Western Europe on October 20, 2026. The incident began at 06:08 UTC in the europe-west2-b availability zone and affected multiple cloud services including BigQuery, Cloud Run, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Filestore, Google App Engine, and Managed Service for Apache Kafka. The outage cascaded to numerous businesses reliant on Google Cloud infrastructure, with confirmed disruptions reported at financial institutions Lloyds Bank, HSBC, and Revolut; postal service Royal Mail; property website Rightmove; and logistics provider DPD, among others.

Revolut confirmed it experienced service disruption affecting multiple services but stated that "all our customers' money and data are safe." Lloyds reported that while its app was operational, some customers had issues with certain online services. HM Courts and Tribunal Service, which manages remote video hearings in English and Welsh courts, reported being affected by issues with Cloud Video Platform. According to Down Detector reports, disruption peaked around 9am and began resolving by mid-afternoon.

Google confirmed in a statement that the outage was caused by "a power event" at a third-party facility within its europe-west2 region and stated that services had been restored. The company's engineering team initially had no estimated recovery time and no workarounds available, though Google later suggested customers might migrate workloads to other available locations if feasible. The Guardian reported that the outage highlighted the concentration of critical UK infrastructure—including up to 60% of government services—on a small number of cloud providers, with internet infrastructure expert Michał Woźniak noting that "hyperscalers have become too big to not fail."

The London incident occurred one year after a larger AWS outage that impacted over 1,000 sites globally, including UK banks and services like Roblox and Signal. Previous investigations into AWS outages have linked disruptions to bugs in automation software and AI tools adopted after staff reductions. Google has announced that 75% of its new code is now AI-generated and approved by engineers, raising questions about potential impacts on service reliability.