A power failure inside a single Google Cloud data centre zone in London on Tuesday triggered hours of disruption at some of Britain's best-known banks and services, including Revolut, Lloyds Bank and HSBC, as well as court hearings and the NHS app — reviving a now-familiar question about how much of the country's digital infrastructure depends on a small handful of cloud providers.
Google Cloud said the issue stemmed from 'a power event' inside europe-west2-b, one of several data centre zones that make up its europe-west2 region in London. In a statement, the company said it had 'resolved a disruption to Google Cloud services at a third-party facility' and that 'services have been restored,' adding it would publish a fuller analysis on its public service health dashboard.
A narrower outage than last year's, but still wide enough to bite
Problems began appearing around 9am local time, according to reports logged on the outage-tracking site Downdetector, and were 'somewhat resolved' by mid-afternoon. Revolut confirmed 'a service disruption affecting multiple services' but said customer funds were never at risk. Royal Mail, Lloyds and HSBC were also named among affected services, and court hearings and NHS app functions were disrupted for part of the day.
The outage was smaller in scope than a similar incident roughly a year earlier, when an Amazon Web Services failure in its us-east-1 region — a far larger, more concentrated node in Virginia — triggered a 15-hour global cascade that knocked out Roblox and Signal and even caused some internet-connected mattresses to overheat overnight. Tuesday's Google disruption, by contrast, was largely confined to UK-based customers of a single regional zone.
The concentration problem regulators have already flagged
The incident lands months after UK financial regulators moved, in July, to directly oversee four major cloud providers — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle — as 'critical third parties' to the financial system, following concerns that more than 65% of UK organisations now rely on the same small set of infrastructure providers. That designation does not amount to regulatory approval of any provider, but reflects an acknowledgment that a single outage at one of the big four can cascade across banking apps, card payments and trading systems largely outside any individual bank's control.
It happened again.
Aisha Down, writing in the Guardian
What happens next
Google Cloud says a detailed incident report is still forthcoming, and UK regulators are expected to seek further explanation of why a single zone's power failure was able to disrupt services as varied as banking and the courts. For customers, Tuesday's outage is unlikely to be the last: cloud outages have already knocked out banking apps, card payments and trading tools for hours at a time more than once in the past two years, and critics argue that until businesses diversify across providers or regions, each new concentration of digital infrastructure creates a new single point of failure.
