Google Cloud Outage in London Disrupts Revolut, HSBC, Royal Mail, and Other UK Services

A power problem in one Google Cloud zone in London took banking apps, delivery tracking, and court video links offline across the UK on Tuesday morning. Google Cloud reported that multiple services were experiencing elevated errors and intermittent network failures in its europe-west2 region, which is based in London and serves customers primarily in the UK and Ireland. The issues began around 7 a.m. BST. On its status page the company later said a power event had caused an outage in the europe-west2-b zone, that the power event had been mitigated, and that partial restoration of infrastructure services was expected within 30 minutes, with remaining services to follow. Other European regions, including Paris and Frankfurt, were not reporting the same problems. Affected Google products included Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run, Cloud Storage, App Engine, Filestore, Pub/Sub, and others. The customer impact was immediate and visible. Revolut, the digital bank, posted that it was experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services, including card payments and ATM withdrawals, and that all customers’ money and data were safe. Downdetector and company statements showed problems at HSBC, Lloyds, Bank of Scotland, and Halifax. Royal Mail, DPD, Rightmove, and NHS England systems were among those with user reports. The courts service’s video links were affected; the Criminal Bar Association said prosecution and defence barristers in England and Wales could not proceed with trials and other hearings. ING in Germany reported login problems with its online banking and app. Emma, a UK budgeting app, said it was down because of the Google Cloud outage and that the issue was technical, not a security breach. What Failed and Where europe-west2 has multiple availability zones designed so that a failure in one does not take down the region. The outage was concentrated in zone b after the power event. Customers whose workloads were pinned to that zone, or whose architectures did not fail over cleanly, saw errors. Customers in other zones or other regions were largely unaffected. That is the design working as intended for those who used it, and the design failing for those who had not spread their load. Google’s status updates through the morning described ongoing investigation, then mitigation of the power event, then staged recovery. No firm end-to-end recovery time was published in the earliest notices. The list of affected external services is a map of who runs critical UK functions on that region. A neobank that cannot authorize card payments, a postal service that cannot update tracking, a court system that cannot open video hearings, and a mortgage lender whose app will not load are different businesses with the same dependency. European regulators have warned for years about financial-sector reliance on a small number of cloud providers. Tuesday’s outage is a concrete instance of that warning, limited to one zone in one region, and still broad enough to strand customers at payment terminals. What Companies Told Customers Revolut’s message was the clearest on safety: disruption yes, money and data safe. Halifax and Lloyds Banking Group said they were aware of issues affecting other organisations and were monitoring. Royal Mail and DPD acknowledged connection problems. None of the early statements quantified how many customers were unable to transact or for how long. Downdetector spikes are user reports, not a census. They show that the problems were widespread enough to be noticed at scale. They do not show the percentage of each firm’s traffic that failed. The power-event explanation is Google’s. It has not, in the public updates available Tuesday morning, described whether the event was an internal electrical failure, a utility issue, or something else, or why zone redundancy did not fully contain it for every customer. Those details usually arrive in a post-incident report days later. Why One Zone Matters Cloud regions are sold as resilient. A single zone outage that cascades into bank apps and court hearings shows the residual risk when applications are not multi-zone or multi-region, or when a dependency (identity, payments, storage) is. For a UK customer of Revolut or HSBC, the distinction between Google’s zone and the bank’s app is invisible. The app does not work. For regulators who have pushed operational-resilience rules on banks, the question is whether those rules required the banks to survive a cloud-zone failure, and whether Tuesday met the standard. The outage is hours old. The compliance questions will last longer. What to Watch Google’s next status updates and any post-incident report on the power event. How long card payments, postal tracking, and court video remained impaired. Whether any firm reports data loss — none has so far. Regulatory comments from UK or EU authorities on cloud concentration. Whether customers in other Google regions saw secondary effects. Multiple online services went down or degraded on Tuesday after Google Cloud reported issues in its London region. Revolut, HSBC, Lloyds, Royal Mail, and others were affected. Google linked the start of the problem to a power event in one zone and said mitigation was underway. Customer money was reported safe where firms addressed it. The outage is a reminder that a large share of UK digital services runs through a small number of cloud zones, and that a failure in one of them is visible at supermarket tills and in courtrooms. Digital8Hub will update when Google publishes a full incident report or when the major services confirm full restoration.