A power failure at one of Google Cloud's London data-centre zones on Tuesday, 20 October 2026, knocked out or slowed services across the UK for much of the day. Revolut customers were unable to pay by card or withdraw cash, several high-street banks reported problems, and the video platform used for remote hearings in courts in England and Wales went down.
What happened
Problems began at about 06:08 UTC, when Google's status page reported "elevated errors and intermittent network failures" in its europe-west2 region, which serves London. Google later said the cause was a "power event" in one of the region's three zones, europe-west2-b, according to reports by BigGo Finance and Tech-Insider.
Google listed 38 affected products, including core services such as Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run, Cloud Storage, BigQuery and Pub/Sub. Most customer workloads were recovering by around 12:44 UTC, and Google said it was aiming for full recovery of existing workloads by 13:00 UTC. It advised customers who could not wait to move workloads to its Paris or Frankfurt regions, which were unaffected.
"We apologize to all who are affected by the disruption," Google said, as quoted by The Register.
Who was affected
- Revolut: card payments, ATM withdrawals, transfers and log-ins were disrupted. Customers reported being stuck at supermarket tills and petrol stations. Revolut said customers' money and data were safe.
- Banks: customers of Lloyds, HSBC, Bank of Scotland and Halifax, as well as ING in Germany, reported problems, though not all of these were confirmed as linked to Google.
- Courts: the Cloud Video Platform used for remote hearings across England and Wales went down, delaying hearings, according to Cybernews and BigGo.
- Others: some other UK services reported issues during the morning, but their links to the Google outage were not confirmed.
The outage tracking site Downdetector logged more than 1,500 reports shortly after 08:00 UK time, according to The Guardian, as cited by Cybernews.
A first test for the UK's cloud rules
The incident is significant beyond the inconvenience. In July, the UK designated Google Cloud's EMEA business a "critical third party" to the financial sector, placing it under the oversight of the Bank of England, the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Tuesday's outage was reportedly the first real test of that regime. The FCA said it was in contact with Google, and the PRA was also reported to be in talks with the company.
The regime was created because so much of the financial system now runs on a handful of cloud providers. When one has a problem, many banks and fintechs can fail at the same time.
Why one zone mattered so much
Cloud regions are split into separate "zones", each with its own power and networking, so that a failure in one should not take down services built to run across several. The scale of Tuesday's disruption suggests some customers relied heavily on the single affected zone, or that knock-on effects spread further than expected. Google has not yet published its post-incident review, which should explain why the impact was so wide.
The outage came roughly a year after a major Amazon Web Services outage, another reminder that the internet's dependence on a few big cloud companies is a recurring risk. For more on the scale of spending on cloud and AI infrastructure, see our analysis Is AI a Bubble?
What happens next
Customers and regulators will be looking for Google's incident report, and the FCA and PRA are likely to ask affected banks how well their backup plans worked. Google's parent company, Alphabet, reports its third-quarter results on 28 October, where analysts may ask about the outage.
