A major Google Cloud outage in London disrupted banking, payment and public-sector services across the UK on October 20, exposing how heavily critical services now depend on a small number of cloud providers.
The incident affected Google Cloud’s europe-west2 region, which is based in London and primarily serves customers in the UK and Ireland.
Google said 38 cloud products were affected during the outage, which lasted seven hours and 52 minutes.
Services were later restored, with the company attributing the disruption to a power-related event.
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Banks and Payment Services Felt the Impact
Digital bank Revolut was among the most visible companies affected.
Customers reported problems with card payments, ATM withdrawals and other services during the outage.
Revolut said customer funds and data remained secure while it worked to restore operations.
Lloyds Banking Group and HSBC also reported disruption to some online services.
The incident showed how a cloud infrastructure failure can quickly become a financial-services problem even when banks’ own core systems have not been directly attacked.
Modern banking applications increasingly rely on external cloud providers for computing, databases, authentication, storage and other services.
If one of those underlying systems becomes unavailable, customers may lose access to banking functions even when their accounts themselves remain intact.
NHS, Royal Mail and Other Services Also Affected
The disruption extended beyond banking.
NHS England experienced problems with some digital services, while Royal Mail and delivery company DPD also reported issues.
Property platform Rightmove was among the other services affected.
Google’s status dashboard showed that products including Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Filestore, AlloyDB, Apigee and BigQuery Data Transfer Service were among those experiencing problems.
Some cloud products suffered complete service outages, while others experienced elevated errors and intermittent network failures.
That distinction matters.
A cloud outage does not necessarily mean every customer using the affected region becomes completely unavailable.
Companies with systems distributed across several regions may be able to continue operating.
Businesses relying heavily on a single cloud region can face much greater disruption.
What Caused the Google Cloud Outage
Google later said the incident resulted from a “power event” affecting part of its London infrastructure.
A power event can involve loss or instability in electrical supply to data-centre systems.
Large data centres usually have multiple layers of backup power, including batteries and generators.
But even highly redundant systems can experience cascading failures if equipment does not switch correctly or if network and storage services are affected during the transition.
Google has not yet published its full technical incident report.
A detailed post-incident analysis is expected to explain what failed, how the outage spread and what measures will be taken to prevent a repeat.
The company said the disruption had been fully mitigated by later on October 20.
Why One Cloud Region Can Affect So Many Companies
Cloud computing allows companies to rent computing infrastructure instead of building and maintaining their own data centres.
That has made digital services cheaper to launch and easier to scale.
But it has also concentrated a large amount of critical infrastructure inside a small number of companies.
Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud dominate much of the global cloud market.
When one large region experiences a serious failure, hundreds or thousands of unrelated organisations can be affected simultaneously.
A bank, hospital, delivery company and government agency may appear to operate independently while relying on the same cloud infrastructure behind the scenes.
That creates what regulators call concentration risk.
The problem is not simply that one provider may experience an outage.
It is that too many important services could fail at the same time.
Regulators Are Increasing Scrutiny of Cloud Dependence
Financial regulators in both the UK and European Union have already increased oversight of major cloud providers.
The UK has placed large technology firms including Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Oracle under greater regulatory scrutiny because of their importance to financial institutions.
European regulators have similarly identified Google Cloud and other major providers as critical third-party technology suppliers to the financial sector.
The Financial Conduct Authority said it was examining the impact of the October 20 disruption with affected companies.
Regulators increasingly expect banks to plan for cloud failures rather than assuming providers will always remain available.
That can include distributing important workloads across several data centres or even multiple cloud providers.
However, such redundancy can be expensive and technically complicated.
The outage therefore highlights a difficult trade-off.
Cloud infrastructure provides efficiency and scale, but deeper dependence also means failures at one technology provider can spread rapidly across large parts of the economy.
What this means for you:
A banking or public-service outage does not always mean the organisation itself has been hacked. Many services depend on external cloud infrastructure, so failures at a major provider can affect several unrelated companies at once.
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