The Oct. 20 outage disrupted banking and public services, prompting UK and European authorities to examine the resilience of critical technology providers.
- A Google Cloud London data center power failure knocks out digital payment services for Revolut, Lloyds, and HSBC customers.
- The outage strikes zone europe-west2-b, disrupting thirteen million UK Revolut accounts alongside Royal Mail and the HM Courts Video Platform.
- Financial Conduct Authority regulators investigate Google Cloud under critical third-party rules to assess systemic concentration risks across British retail banking.
Thousands of UK customers experienced disruption to banking services on Oct. 20 after a power-related failure at Google Cloud affected Revolut, Lloyds Banking Group and HSBC. Customers reported problems with card payments, cash withdrawals and account access, while Revolut listed interruptions across several of its services.
The outage began in Google Cloud’s London region and affected multiple cloud products. It also prompted regulatory scrutiny of a provider designated as critical to the UK financial system just three months earlier, bringing questions about cloud resilience into focus through a specific, documented incident.
What Failed and How the Disruption Spread
Google Cloud’s service status dashboard reported elevated errors and intermittent network failures in its europe-west2 region at approximately 7:08 a.m. British Summer Time on Oct. 20. The company attributed the incident to a “power event” at a third-party facility that took the europe-west2-b zone offline.
The disruption affected several products, including Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage and Cloud Run. Google divides its infrastructure into regions and zones to help isolate failures, but the incident disrupted services beyond the affected zone. The company advised customers to move workloads to another zone or region where feasible. As of Oct. 22, Google had not published its promised detailed analysis of the incident.
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→ Submit a Press ReleaseHow the Banks Were Affected and What Customers Experienced
Revolut, which has approximately 13 million UK customers, reported problems with card payments, ATM withdrawals, account logins, transfers, currency exchange and stock trading. Its status page listed several services as partially unavailable. Downdetector, a platform that collects user-submitted outage reports, recorded more than 1,500 reports relating to Revolut early that morning. The figure represents reports, not verified individual customers.
Lloyds Banking Group, which includes Lloyds Bank, Halifax and Bank of Scotland, acknowledged problems with some online services. HSBC also confirmed that some customers had difficulty accessing its services. Neither bank published a consolidated count of affected customers or quantified the financial impact of the disruption.
The effects extended beyond banking. HM Courts & Tribunals Service reported disruption to its Cloud Video Platform, which supports remote court hearings. Royal Mail, DPD and Rightmove also reported problems. The precise technical dependencies linking these organizations to the Google Cloud incident had not been publicly detailed, leaving the extent of the disruption across individual services unclear.
The Regulatory and Concentration-Risk Angle
On July 13, 2026, HM Treasury designated Google Cloud EMEA Limited, Microsoft Ireland Operations Limited, Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL and Oracle Corporation UK Limited as critical third parties under the UK’s financial services oversight regime. The designation gives financial regulators powers to oversee technology providers whose services are important to the financial system. Banks remain responsible for maintaining their own operational resilience.
On Oct. 20, Treasury Committee Chair Dame Meg Hillier wrote to the Bank of England governor and the Financial Conduct Authority’s chief executive seeking details of the outage, its effects on customers and any financial harm. The FCA said it was engaging with Google. The European Banking Authority also contacted Google Cloud to assess the potential impact on financial institutions in the European Union.
The inquiries have not established the total customer impact or financial losses. Nor have regulators published findings on whether the existing safeguards were sufficient to contain the disruption. Those assessments will depend on further evidence from the companies and the authorities’ examination of the incident.
Google Reports Restoration, Full Impact Remains Unclear
Google reported that the disruption had been resolved and services restored. Its updates on Oct. 20 said most affected workloads had recovered by the afternoon, although a very small number of customers remained affected in at least one update. The company said it would publish a detailed analysis of what happened.
Revolut said customer money and data remained safe throughout the outage. Lloyds Banking Group and HSBC acknowledged service problems, but public statements did not establish how many customers were affected at either institution. As of Oct. 22, the banks had not published consolidated figures for customer losses or compensation, and Google’s detailed incident analysis remained outstanding.
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