Google Cloud outage at London data centre disrupts UK banks

A power failure at a Google Cloud data centre near London hit banking services across the UK on Tuesday, according to The Trumpet. Google confirmed the incident and said it started at 0608 UTC in its europe-west2 region, with full service restoration expected by around 1300 UTC, or about 6 hours and 52 minutes later.

Digital bank Revolut and major lenders Lloyds and HSBC were among the organisations affected. A source familiar with the matter told The Trumpet that Revolut customers had issues with ATM withdrawals, transfers and card top-ups, and linked those problems to the Google Cloud failure. Lloyds confirmed some customers had difficulty using its app and online banking. The bank said: "We are aware some customers are having issues with our app and online banking." HSBC acknowledged that customers had trouble accessing its services and said the situation was also affecting other organisations. HSBC said it would keep monitoring the incident while work to restore services went on.

Google said the failure was due to a power issue at its London data centre. In an earlier update, Google said: "Multiple Google Cloud services are experiencing elevated errors and intermittent network failures in the europe-west2 region." Later, Google said it expected full restoration at about 1300 UTC.

Other businesses also reported interruptions. Users of property website Rightmove and postal service Royal Mail experienced service interruptions, The Trumpet reported. The monitoring platform Downdetector logged hundreds of problem reports for several businesses during the outage.

Revolut apologised to customers and said it had been working on a fix since the problem was first spotted. A Revolut spokesperson said: "We can confirm that all our customers' money and data are safe."

By the time of the report, Google had not given further details in its status updates about the exact cause of the power failure or how widespread the impact was. The incident shows how problems at big cloud providers can hit many companies that rely on them for their digital services, The Trumpet said.