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Google said on its cloud status dashboard that a power event caused an outage in the europe-west2-b zone of its London region, resulting in elevated errors and intermittent network failures for multiple services including Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine and Cloud Run. The company stated the power event had been mitigated and added that it was seeing the recovery of services while prioritising existing workloads, with partial mitigation for infrastructure services expected within 30 minutes. Google apologised to all affected by the disruption and noted customers may not be able to create new workloads during the recovery phase, which it projected would be completed tentatively by 1300 UTC according to a Bloomberg report.
Revolut confirmed a service disruption affecting card payments, balance top-ups, ATM withdrawals and currency exchange but emphasised that customers’ money and data remained safe. Lloyds Banking Group, owner of Halifax and Bank of Scotland, told the BBC it was aware of similar issues affecting other organisations and was monitoring the situation closely. HSBC issued a statement acknowledging that some customers were experiencing difficulties accessing its services amid the outage that began shortly after 7 a.m. UK time.
The disruption extended to the UK courts service where video links were affected, preventing barristers from proceeding with trials and hearings as the Criminal Bar Association reported to BBC News. Delivery company DPD, property portal Rightmove and Royal Mail also encountered problems with Downdetector recording more than 1,500 reports for Revolut shortly after 8 a.m. BST, according to multiple outlets including CNN. Business Insider reported that budgeting application Emma attributed its outage directly to the Google Cloud incident in London.
A 2025 assessment by the European Banking Authority, European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority and European Securities and Markets Authority designated Google Cloud among critical third-party providers for the finance industry, citing risks from reliance on such infrastructure. A subsequent Reuters report highlighted regulators’ focus on ensuring these providers maintain robust risk management to prevent systemic impacts from outages. The incident comes as UK banks increasingly depend on cloud services for daily operations, amplifying the effect of even brief technical failures.
Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., did not immediately provide further details beyond its status page updates, referring inquiries to the published information as noted in reports from the Financial Times and The Register. The company suggested customers migrate workloads to other regions if feasible while its engineering team continued to investigate. By early afternoon some services had begun returning to normal, though full restoration timelines remained under observation across affected sectors.
