Google Cloud outage knocks out UK banks and courts: what happened
Web StoryWatch this story in 15 seconds →Key takeaways
- A power failure at Google Cloud's London region hit banks and courts on Oct 20.
- Revolut, Lloyds, HSBC, DPD and the courts' video platform stopped working for hours.
- Most services recovered by the evening, but court systems took longer to fix.
On Tuesday, October 20, a power event hit Google Cloud's London region. Banking apps, delivery services and court hearings across the UK went down. Thousands of people could not pay with their cards for hours.
What happened
Just after 7 in the morning UK time, one of Google's three London zones lost power. The zone is called europe-west2-b.
Google's own dashboard first recorded the incident at 06:08 GMT. That detail comes from reports of the company's status page.
Banks, delivery firms and courts all ran on that cloud. When the zone failed, their services failed too.
Google's status page listed elevated errors across many products. These included Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run and Cloud Storage.
App Engine, Cloud Filestore and Cloud Pub/Sub were also hit. BigQuery Data Transfer Service went down too.
The damage list was long. Banks and fintech firms hit included Revolut, Lloyds Bank, HSBC and Barclays.
Bank of Scotland, NatWest, Halifax, Nationwide, the app Emma and Equifax were also hit. Computer Weekly named all of them.
Delivery and retail firms hit included Royal Mail, DPD and Screwfix. Property and web services hit included Rightmove, BT and the hosting firm SiteGround.
Public-sector services hit included NHS England, HM Courts and Tribunals Service and gov.uk. Spotify also stopped working for many users.
At 10 in the morning, the courts' Cloud Video Platform went down across large parts of England and Wales. This platform runs remote hearings.
The Criminal Bar Association said trials and hearings could not proceed. It wrote that many lawyers "can not proceed with trials and other hearings."
Revolut customers were stranded at checkouts. Some could not open the app at all. Cards were refused in shops and at petrol stations.
One customer said his elderly mother waited an hour at a supermarket counter. Her card did not work.
Revolut told customers that all money and data were safe. It apologized and said it was working on a fix. Later that evening, the company confirmed its services were fully restored.
DownDetector logged thousands of problem reports. These covered Google, Revolut, Lloyds, HSBC and Barclays.
Halifax, Royal Mail, Bank of Scotland, DPD and Sky were listed too. More than 1,500 Revolut reports arrived shortly after 8 in the morning, The Guardian reported.
Why it matters
Most people never think about the cloud when they tap a card. But the tap travels through servers owned by Google, Amazon or Microsoft. When those servers fail, your payment fails too.
Google's London region is its only cloud region in the UK. When one zone failed, customers had no second UK location to switch to. Computer Weekly called this a single point of failure.
That is why one failure hit banks and courts at the same time. Delivery firms and the NHS went down too.
Many critical services share the same pipes. When those pipes break, the damage spreads fast.
An administrator shared Google's engineering update. It said backup generators failed to engage during the first outage.
Mains power had returned, but the zone stayed drained while technicians checked the power systems. Another engineer said the two healthy zones did not fully absorb the load.
The outage came exactly one year after Amazon's big cloud outage on October 20, 2025. That outage also hit hundreds of online services across the UK and Europe.
The Financial Conduct Authority said it was aware of the incident. It said it was engaging with Google and the affected firms. It expected firms to fix the problems fast so people could access their money.
What happens next
At 12:27 in the afternoon, Google said the power event was mitigated. It said partial recovery would follow within 30 minutes. By 2:48 in the afternoon, the company reported recovery of services for most workloads in europe-west2.
At 3 in the afternoon, Google said the issue was mitigated for most customers. It said only a very small number of customers were still affected. It promised a full analysis once its internal investigation was complete.
By late afternoon, most services had recovered. But court systems lagged behind. The Ministry of Justice confirmed its systems were not fully restored at 3:52 in the afternoon.
The NHS app issue was resolved around midday, according to BBC coverage. Lloyds told customers the root issues were resolved. It expected services to return to normal soon.
Revolut said its services were back up and running by the evening. It confirmed again that all customer money and data had stayed safe throughout the incident.
Google will publish a full technical analysis of the incident. Regulators may now ask harder questions. How much should banks depend on one cloud provider?
The next time your banking app stops working, check the news. The cause may sit in a data center far away.
Keeping a little cash and a backup payment method remains the simplest defense.
When you store photos in the cloud, they live on servers like these. That is why a single failure can reach millions of people.
Want to know where your online files actually live? Read our plain-English guide to cloud storage.
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