Google Cloud says a power failure in its London cloud region disrupted services for more than six hours Tuesday, affecting banks and public-sector websites as other businesses reported problems.
Google’s preliminary incident report, published Oct. 22, puts the main customer-impact window at 23:00 PDT on Monday, Oct. 19, through 05:10 PDT on Tuesday, Oct. 20. That is 06:00 to 12:10 UTC Tuesday, or 07:00 to 13:10 in London. The physical outage was confined to the europe-west2-b zone, but some workloads in other parts of the region also experienced errors and delays.
Which Google Cloud services were affected?
Google’s incident page listed dozens of affected Google Cloud products across compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics and managed application services. The affected list included Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Cloud Load Balancing, Virtual Private Cloud, Firestore, Spanner and App Engine.
That breadth is significant because many customer-facing apps do not rely on one cloud product. A payment app, for example, may use compute, database, storage and networking services behind the scenes. When several building blocks degrade at the same time, the consumer sees a single app failure, even though the root cause sits deeper in the cloud stack.
Recognizable services reported disruption
The Associated Press reported that online services for several U.K. banks were disrupted, including Lloyds, Halifax, HSBC and Revolut. AP noted that the outage was centered in London but could affect users outside the U.K. if their apps relied on London-based infrastructure.
Reuters reported that Revolut said multiple services were disrupted, with its status page showing card payments and ATM withdrawals as affected. Reuters also reported that Downdetector showed issue reports affecting Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Rightmove, DPD, NHS England and Royal Mail. Downdetector data is based on user reports, so it indicates reported disruption rather than a full measure of confirmed customer impact.
By Oct. 21, Revolut’s public status page showed all systems operational for the United Kingdom. Google’s final incident update said the issue had been mitigated for most customers and that only a very small number of customers were believed to remain affected at that point.
Google says a power event was behind the incident
Google’s preliminary report says a power-grid disruption at the facility hosting europe-west2-b triggered the outage. Backup batteries temporarily maintained power, but a controller fault prevented the emergency generators from taking over. Servers, storage and network equipment in the zone went offline when the batteries ran out. Traffic shifted to other zones, straining their capacity, while cross-zone service dependencies caused additional timeouts and errors.
Google said recovery for most workloads was underway by 05:10 PDT Tuesday and that it prioritized existing workloads before new workload creation. During the incident, Google advised affected customers to migrate to another zone or region if feasible. The Oct. 22 report is preliminary; Google says a final report with preventive actions will follow.
The incident lands in a sensitive regulatory moment
The outage hit only months after the U.K. government designated Google Cloud EMEA Limited, Microsoft Ireland Operations Limited, Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL and Oracle Corporation UK Limited as Critical Third Parties to the financial sector, effective July 13, 2026.
HM Treasury said in July that disruption at a major supplier could affect multiple financial firms at the same time. The designation gives the Bank of England, Prudential Regulation Authority and Financial Conduct Authority direct oversight of critical services those providers deliver to the financial sector. HM Treasury also said financial firms remain responsible for managing risks from third-party suppliers.
On Oct. 21, the European Banking Authority said it had contacted Google to assess the outage’s potential impact on EU financial firms. Britain’s Treasury Committee also requested information from the Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority about their response, the scale of disruption and possible financial harm. Neither inquiry establishes a regulatory breach. Both reflect concerns about multiple financial firms depending on the same cloud infrastructure.
Why one cloud zone can still cause wider pain
Cloud architecture often sounds safer because providers offer regions, zones and redundancy options. The Google incident shows that resilience still depends on how each customer has designed and tested its own workloads. A cloud provider can offer multiple locations, but an application may still have dependencies, data paths or operational habits tied to one location.
For Canadian businesses, the relevant takeaway is not that Google Cloud, or any other major provider, is unreliable. Cloud adoption and resilience are different projects. The practical questions are whether critical systems can fail over across zones or regions, whether operational runbooks have been tested, and whether customer-facing status pages can explain an infrastructure dependency without adding confusion.
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