Google Cloud power failure in London knocks out Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC for hours
A "power event" in Google's London cloud region disrupted British banks and public-sector websites on Tuesday. Google says full service has been restored; the Financial Conduct Authority is engaging.
Symbolic image · Photo: Lambtron / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped and resized)
A power failure in Google's europe-west2 cloud region in London disrupted services at British banks and businesses for several hours on Tuesday. Google said the incident began at 6:08 a.m. GMT, with multiple cloud services showing elevated errors and intermittent network failures. The company blamed a "power event."
Digital bank Revolut was among those hit, with card payments and ATM withdrawals affected, according to Reuters; the firm said customers' money and data were safe. Customers of Lloyds, Halifax and HSBC also reported problems with apps and online banking. Rightmove, DPD, NHS England and Royal Mail appeared on outage tracker Downdetector, though it was not confirmed that all disruptions were linked to Google.
Google later said its engineering teams had restored full service availability. The Financial Conduct Authority said it was engaging with Google and the affected firms. Britain placed Google Cloud, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Oracle under direct oversight as critical third parties to the financial sector in July.