A power failure at a Google data centre in London disrupted Google Cloud services across the company’s London region this morning, causing problems for customers of businesses including the banks Revolut and Lloyds, the delivery company DPD and the property website Rightmove.
Google said on its service health page that the incident began at 07:08 UK time today in its London region, which it labels europe-west2. In an update it said that “due to a power event we had suffered” there had been an outage within one zone of the region, europe-west2-b, and that the power event was “mitigated”.
Earlier updates said multiple services in the region were experiencing “elevated errors and intermittent network failures”. At the time of its latest update, Google listed 38 products as affected, including Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Cloud SQL and Kubernetes Engine.
In an update posted at 12:58 UK time, Google said it was seeing services recover and was prioritising existing workloads, adding that customers “may not be able to yet create new workloads”. It said full recovery of existing workloads should be completed, “tentatively”, by 14:00 UK time.
Google’s advice to affected customers was to move workloads to another zone or region “if feasible”.
Revolut was particularly hard hit. The digital-only bank confirmed that “multiple services” had been affected, including card payments, transfers, ATM withdrawals, its trading platform and sign-ins, but said that “all our customers’ money and data are safe”.
In a post on X, Revolut said: “We’ve been working to fix the issue since it was identified this morning and apologise to anyone affected and for any inconvenience caused.”
Lloyds said: “Our app is online and customers can log in normally, though we understand some are having issues with certain online services this morning. We are aware of similar issues affecting other organisations and are monitoring the situation closely.”
Other websites and apps that appeared to be affected included HSBC and Royal Mail.
HM Courts & Tribunals Service also reported problems with its cloud video platform, which is used for some remote hearings, although it was unclear whether these were linked to Google.
The disruption follows several large IT failures in recent years. Two years ago a faulty software update from the American cybersecurity company CrowdStrike caused millions of computers running Microsoft Windows to crash, affecting everything from airports to the NHS. Amazon Web Services suffered a major outage last year.
In June, Worldpay said a third-party power disruption had caused intermittent problems authorising transactions, a fault that left pubs and shops taking cash only during an England World Cup match.
Dr Amro Al-Said Ahmad, a lecturer in computer science at Keele University, said: “The incident highlights the dependency effect of modern cloud ecosystems.
“When a core cloud region experiences failures, the impact extends far beyond the directly affected services. Applications, APIs, databases, authentication systems, payment platforms, analytics pipelines, and third-party SaaS products that depend on those services can all experience cascading failures.”
Research by the Cyber Monitoring Centre and Parametrix, which specialises in cover for technology downtime, found that more than 60 per cent of UK organisations are dependent on the cloud, rising to more than 80 per cent of FTSE 100 companies.
The same research found that around 80 per cent of UK organisations depend on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, and put dependency in the finance sector at 76 per cent. It estimated that a 24-hour outage of a single Amazon Web Services region, eu-west-1, could generate losses of about £1bn, excluding downstream effects.
The structure of the UK cloud market has drawn scrutiny before. In 2023, Amazon and Google complained to the Competition and Markets Authority that Microsoft’s licensing practices restricted customer choice in cloud computing, a claim Microsoft disputed.
Google said it would provide a further update on the London incident by 14:00 UK time.
