Google Cloud Power Outage Disrupts UK Banks and Public Services
Google Cloud experienced a power outage in London on October 20, disrupting services for Revolut, Lloyds, the NHS, and HM Courts and Tribunals Service.
A power outage at a Google Cloud data center in London caused widespread service disruptions across the United Kingdom on Tuesday, October 20, 2026. The incident, which Google described as a power event in its europe-west2 region, began at 06:08 GMT and peaked around 9:00 AM, causing intermittent network failures and elevated errors.
The outage triggered cascading failures for numerous financial institutions and public services. Revolut customers were unable to access accounts, perform card payments, make ATM withdrawals, or execute transfers, with some impacts extending to Singapore. Other banks reporting disruptions included Lloyds, Halifax, and HSBC. Beyond finance, the outage affected Royal Mail, the budgeting app Emma, and NHS England. HM Courts and Tribunal Services reported issues with its Cloud Video Platform, which hindered remote hearings in England and Wales.
Google reported that most services were mitigated or resolved by mid-afternoon. The company confirmed its engineering team investigated the issue and announced it would publish a full analysis following an internal investigation. Revolut assured customers that all money and data remained safe during the disruption. The event has renewed regulatory concerns in the UK and EU regarding the financial sector's heavy dependency on a small number of cloud infrastructure providers.
