Power Failure Disrupts Key Services
A power incident at Google Cloud has disrupted banking apps, delivery services and court hearings across parts of the United Kingdom.
The disruption was reported on Tuesday, 20 October, after problems emerged at Google's London-based europe-west2 cloud region.
Google said several services had been affected. The company later reported that recovery was under way, with existing workloads being prioritised.
Banks and Businesses Affected
Revolut, Halifax and Lloyds reported problems affecting some customers. Delivery company DPD also acknowledged connection issues with its website.
Revolut said customers' funds and data remained safe. It apologised for the disruption and said efforts to restore services were continuing.
Halifax said it was aware of problems affecting its app and website. Customers were advised that telephone support remained available.
Lloyds said its app was working normally, although some customers were experiencing difficulties with other online services.
The extent of the disruption varied. Reports of problems on Downdetector increased during Tuesday morning, though not every reported incident was confirmed to be linked to Google Cloud.
Court Hearings Interrupted
The outage also affected remote hearings in England and Wales.
HM Courts and Tribunals Service said it was aware of problems with its Cloud Video Platform. Work was under way with technology partners to restore access.
The Criminal Bar Association said the disruption had prevented some prosecution and defence barristers from proceeding with trials and other hearings.
The interruption raised concerns about further delays in a court system already working to clear backlogs.
Google Cites a Power Incident
Google attributed the disruption to a power incident in the europe-west2-b zone. The company said the immediate power problem had been contained, although some infrastructure services remained affected.
Engineers continued to work on restoring services. Google later said recovery was progressing and that the remaining workloads were expected to return shortly.
The company apologised to customers affected by the incident.
Why One Outage Matters
Google Cloud provides computing, storage and other services used by businesses to run their online operations.
Its London region is particularly important to organisations that depend on cloud infrastructure hosted in the United Kingdom. Disruptions can therefore affect several services at once.
The incident also recalled a July 2022 outage at the same cloud region. That earlier disruption was blamed on cooling problems during a heatwave, which led Google to shut down a number of computers.
Google has not linked the latest incident to that earlier failure. The company has instead cited a power event.
Recovery Under Way
By Tuesday afternoon, Google was reporting signs of recovery. However, the full restoration of all affected services had not yet been confirmed in the updates cited.
The incident highlighted the dependence of banks, businesses and public services on shared digital infrastructure. Even when customer funds and data remain safe, interruptions can prevent essential services from operating normally.
