Google Cloud outage in London knocks out UK banks

A power event knocked out Google Cloud's europe-west2-b zone in London on Tuesday and took several UK banks down with it. Google's status page lists 38 affected services and marks the incident closed after 7 hours, 52 minutes.

It began at 06:08 GMT, just after midnight in Mexico City. Cloud Run, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud SQL and Cloud Storage were among the services affected.

Revolut confirmed a disruption to several of its services and said customers' money and data were safe. Lloyds' app is working again, and the bank said it understood the underlying causes had been resolved, according to statements from Revolut and Lloyds. Halifax and HSBC also had failures.

Downdetector, which tracks outages reported by users, also logged problems at Royal Mail, DPD, Rightmove, BT and Screwfix.

Why one zone was enough

Each Google Cloud region is made up of several availability zones, which are independent data centers in the same area. Customers spread their systems across them so that a local problem does not cut off service. Europe-west2-b is one of three in London, so what stands out is that trouble in a single zone reached banking apps and parcel services.

During the incident, Google advised customers to move their workloads to another location where possible. It has not yet published an analysis of the cause beyond the power event.