Google Cloud outage in London knocks out banks, websites and court video links
A 'power event' at Google's europe-west2 cloud region in London disrupted Revolut, Lloyds, HSBC, Royal Mail, DPD and court hearings for most of Tuesday. Google says the problem is now mitigated for almost all customers.
A failure at one of Google's cloud data centres in London disrupted banking apps, websites and public services across the UK on Tuesday, 20 October. Google Cloud's status dashboard shows that problems with multiple services in its europe-west2 (London) region began at 09:08 Bucharest time (07:08 in the UK). The company later said a 'power event' had caused an outage in one of the region's zones, europe-west2-b, while other services in the region saw elevated errors and intermittent network failures.
Customers of Revolut, Lloyds Bank, Halifax, Bank of Scotland and HSBC reported trouble logging in, paying by card, withdrawing cash and moving money. According to BBC News, more than 1,500 problem reports about Revolut were logged on an outage tracker shortly after 08:00 UK time; Revolut blamed a 'third-party issue' and said customers' money and data were safe. Reuters reported that Downdetector also showed problems at Rightmove, parcel firm DPD, NHS England and Royal Mail, which said letter and parcel deliveries were not affected. The courts service said its video platform for remote hearings was hit, and the Criminal Bar Association said trials in England and Wales could not go ahead.
Google said at 17:03 Bucharest time that the issue had been 'mitigated for most of the customers' and was affecting only 'a very small number', and it has closed the incident after about eight hours. It apologised and promised to publish an analysis once its internal investigation is complete. The Guardian reports that the Financial Conduct Authority and the Bank of England, which gained powers this summer to oversee 'critical' cloud suppliers to UK banks, are pressing Google for details. The outage came exactly a year after a major Amazon Web Services failure took more than 1,000 sites offline.
Earlier today: Revolut outage knocks out app and card payments across Europe