Google Cloud London outage disrupts Revolut and UK banks

A power event in one of Google Cloud's London data center zones knocked out services for nearly 8 hours on October 20, 2026. Revolut lost card payments, transfers and sign-in, and customers of Lloyds, HSBC and Bank of Scotland reported problems. The outage shows how one failure inside a single cloud zone can stop everyday banking.

What Google says happened

Google's status page says a power event caused an outage in europe-west2-b. That is one zone of europe-west2, Google's London region. A region is a group of separate data center sites, called zones, that each have their own power and cooling.

Services in that zone went fully down, while the rest of the region saw elevated errors and intermittent network issues. The incident ran from 23:08 on October 19 to 07:00 on October 20, Pacific time. That is 07:08 to 15:00 in London.

Time (Pacific, October 20)	Status update
01:35	Google starts investigating
04:00	Customers told to move workloads to another zone or region
04:12	"The power event is mitigated"
04:58	Services recovering; new workloads may not start yet
05:44	Most workloads recovered as of 05:10
07:03	Mitigated for most customers; a very small number still affected

Google lists 41 affected products. They include Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Cloud Spanner, Pub/Sub, Cloud Run, Persistent Disk and Cloud Load Balancing. That covers the core pieces most apps run on: servers, databases, storage and networking.

Who was hit

Revolut, the UK-based digital bank, was the most visible victim. Its own status page listed ATM withdrawals, identity checks, card payments, transfers, sign-in, chat support and stock and crypto trading as down, Protos reports. Revolut confirmed the problems, and a Reuters source linked them to the Google Cloud disruption, according to Protos.

Customers of Lloyds, HSBC and Bank of Scotland also reported outages on Downdetector, Protos says. The banks' own explanations were not available in the sources, and Google's status page names only its own products, not customers.

What is still open

The incident is closed on Google's status page, but not entirely over. In its last update, Google said the problem "is believed to be affecting currently a very small number of customers." It asked anyone still affected to open a support case.

Google also promised a full write-up. "We will publish an analysis of this incident once we have completed our internal investigation," the status page says. That report should explain why a power problem in one zone spread into errors across the wider region.

What this means for developers

Cloud zones exist so that one failure does not take down everything. This outage tests whether teams actually use them.

• Check how many zones you run in. If your databases or servers live only in europe-west2-b, or only in one zone anywhere, today's outage is your test case. Spread critical services across at least two zones.
• Plan for regional trouble too. The whole region saw errors, not just the failed zone. For payment or login systems, keep a tested path to a second region.
• Make failover a drill, not a document. Google's advice during the outage was to move workloads elsewhere. That only works if you have practiced it and new capacity can start.
• Watch for the incident report. Google's analysis should show how a single-zone power event reached other zones. Read it before your next architecture review.
• Know your vendors' clouds. Outages like this reach users through the services built on top of the cloud. Ask your payment, identity and banking providers where they host and how they fail over.