Google Cloud Outage Knocks Out UK Bank Apps, Full Service Restored in London

Google said on Tuesday that full service had been restored in its London cloud region after a power problem disrupted banking apps, card payments and public services across the United Kingdom for much of the morning, Reuters reported.

The disruption began at 06:08 GMT in europe-west2, the Google Cloud region based in London that serves customers in the UK and Ireland. Google's service status dashboard said multiple services in the region were hit by elevated errors and intermittent network failures, and the company later traced the problem to a power event in one part of the region, europe-west2-b. Google said the power problem had been fixed and that a full recovery of existing workloads should be completed within 30 minutes, and then confirmed that service was back.

Bank payments fail at the morning peak

Revolut, the British digital bank, was the worst hit of the consumer services. A person familiar with the matter told Reuters that Revolut's service outage was related to the Google Cloud disruption. Revolut's status page showed most of its services unavailable or only partly available, including card payments, money transfers and ATM withdrawals.

"We are currently experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services. We can confirm that all our customers' money and data are safe," Revolut said on X. The company said it had been working to fix the issue since it was identified in the morning and apologised for the inconvenience. Downdetector, which tracks outage reports, recorded more than 1,500 reports about Revolut shortly after 8 a.m., The Guardian reported.

Downdetector also showed reports of problems at Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Bank of Scotland, the property website Rightmove, parcel firm DPD, NHS England and Royal Mail, Reuters reported. It was not confirmed that every one of those problems was caused by the Google failure. Lloyds said its app was operating normally but that some customers had problems with certain online services. Halifax said it was aware that some customers were having issues with its app and website. ING in Germany said customers had problems logging into online banking and its app because of a technical issue.

Court hearings stopped

The outage also reached the courts. The Criminal Bar Association said the Cloud Video Platform, used for remote court hearings, had been down across large parts of England and Wales since 10 a.m. Barristers said they could not proceed with trials and other hearings, and that work to clear court backlogs was hampered. HM Courts and Tribunals Service said it was aware of an issue affecting the platform.

Google listed the affected cloud services on its dashboard, among them Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run, App Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud Filestore and Pub/Sub. The list shows how much everyday infrastructure now runs on a small number of cloud providers. In July, the UK designated four technology companies, including Google Cloud EMEA, as critical third-party suppliers to the financial sector, putting them under direct regulatory oversight, Reuters reported. EU regulators designated Google as one of 19 critical third-party computing providers last year.

Tuesday's failure came exactly one year after a major Amazon Web Services outage on October 20, 2025, which also knocked banking apps and public services offline.