Tuesday Edition · Tue 20 Oct 2026
Google Cloud's London Zone Fails, Knocking Out Revolut and Disrupting UK Banks and Royal Mail Services
A power event in one of Google Cloud's London data-centre zones disrupted dozens of services on Tuesday, with knock-on outages reported at Revolut, high-street banks and Royal Mail. Google said the power problem had been mitigated and services were recovering, but the episode raises hard questions about concentration risk.
Chanan Zevin - Chief Editor and Head of Desks
Published
What happened
Multiple Google Cloud services were disrupted in the London region, known as europe-west2, from late Monday Pacific time, according to Google's Service Health page. Google later said that a power event caused an outage within the europe-west2-b zone. More than 20 products were listed as affected, including Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, Cloud Run and Persistent Disk. Google said engineers were working on recovery.
Revolut's outage
Revolut customers were unable to use card payments, ATM withdrawals, transfers and account sign-ins for much of the morning, according to Revolut's status page as reported by TechRadar and RTÉ. A person familiar with the matter told Reuters that Revolut's outage stemmed from the Google Cloud disruption. Revolut said its customers' money and data were safe and apologised for the inconvenience.
Other companies affected
The Register reported impacts at Lloyds, HSBC and Royal Mail, and said Google gave no initial estimate for recovery. UPI reported disruption at UK financial institutions and logistics firms. Delivery firm DPD later said technical issues affecting its website had been resolved, according to The News. These lists come from the outlets named; not every company has confirmed that Google was the cause.
Google's update
Google later said the power event was mitigated and that it was seeing recovery for most workloads in europe-west2, according to its status page and The Guardian. It said it was prioritising the recovery of existing workloads and that customers might not yet be able to create new ones. Google tentatively expected full recovery of existing workloads by 2pm UK time. At the time of writing, the incident was still listed as active.
What is not known
Google has described a power event but has not published a full root-cause analysis. It is not known why a problem in one zone affected services that customers may have expected to fail over to other zones. The Journal does not speculate on the technical cause beyond Google's own description.
The concentration problem
The outage shows how much of the UK's financial infrastructure now depends on a small number of cloud providers and, in some cases, on a single region. Banks are supposed to design systems that survive the loss of a data centre. A single-zone failure that stops payments suggests some services were not as resilient as customers assumed. The Guardian reported that regulators were pushing for details.
The regulatory angle
UK regulators have new powers to oversee critical third parties that provide services to financial firms. Tuesday's incident will be an early test of how those powers work in practice. Firms will be asked how their contingency plans performed and why they did not prevent disruption.
What to watch
Watch for Google's incident report, statements from Revolut and the banks on restoration, and comments from the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority. The scale of compensation claims will also become clearer in the coming days.
Sources
- Google Cloud Service Health, europe-west2 incident, 20 Oct 2026 · status.cloud.google.com
- The Guardian, Google Cloud problems: regulators push for details, 20 Oct 2026 · theguardian.com
- TechRadar, Revolut and Lloyds Bank are down, 20 Oct 2026 · techradar.com
- RTÉ, Revolut services affected due to Google Cloud outage, 20 Oct 2026 · rte.ie
- The News, Google confirms cloud outage mitigated after power event, 20 Oct 2026 · thenews.com.pk
- Reuters, Google Cloud services disrupted in London region, 20 Oct 2026
- The Register and UPI reports on affected UK firms, 20 Oct 2026
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