Google Cloud outage disrupts U.K. banking

On Oct. 20, 2026, Google Cloud reported a disruption in its London region, known as europe-west2, following what it described as a power event in the europe-west2-b zone. The incident began in the early hours of the morning, with issues reported around 06:08 GMT, shortly after 7 a.m. local time.

Google said multiple services in the affected region were experiencing elevated errors and intermittent network failures. Engineering teams focused on stabilising the environment and prioritising recovery of existing workloads hosted in the london-based zone.

The company later stated that the power event had been mitigated and that it was seeing recovery of services for most workloads. It advised impacted customers that, where feasible, they could migrate workloads to another zone or region to reduce disruption.

Google also indicated it would publish an analysis after completing an internal investigation into the incident. Tentative recovery timing was communicated for remaining workloads as services gradually resumed through the day.

British digital bank Revolut reported it was experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services during the incident. Features with partial or full unavailability included card payments, topping up by bank card, ATM withdrawals, transfers and sign-in to accounts.

Revolut told customers that all money and data were safe despite the service disruption. An outage-tracking site recorded a spike of more than 1,500 user reports for Revolut in the early hours of Tuesday, reflecting widespread difficulty accessing core services.

A person familiar with the matter said that Revolut’s outage was related to the Google Cloud disruption in the London region. As Google reported progress in restoring its infrastructure, Revolut’s services began to move toward recovery alongside other affected platforms.

The same morning, several other U.K. financial institutions reported problems with online access and digital tools. Customers of Lloyds Banking Group, including Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland, experienced issues with some online services and logins.

HSBC customers also reported difficulties with certain online banking functions. Beyond the banking sector, several public services, including court video links, were disrupted, indicating the breadth of the impact tied to systems relying on cloud-based infrastructure.

Outage trackers showed increased user reports for other U.K. platforms, including Rightmove, Royal Mail and DPD. These parallel spikes suggested that a range of consumer-facing applications experienced performance or availability issues during the Google Cloud incident.

By early afternoon, services across many affected organisations were beginning to resume as underlying cloud workloads recovered. Regulated firms and public bodies continued monitoring service status while Google advanced its internal review for a forthcoming post-incident analysis.