Google Cloud power event blamed for Tuesday's UK bank and services outages

Google has blamed a power event at its London cloud region for Tuesday’s banking and service outages across the UK and Europe. The disruption began at about 7am UK time, when the company’s europe-west2 region started reporting “elevated errors and intermittent network failures” across services including BigQuery, App Engine and Cloud SQL, according to The Times and The Register. This story follows Flip News’s Tuesday afternoon report on the Revolut outages, filed while no cause had been given.

Google said the power event in one London availability zone had been “mitigated”, and that full recovery was “tentatively” expected by 2pm UK time, The Times reported. Google was prioritising existing workloads; its status page carried updates through the morning, according to Reuters.

Revolut was particularly hard hit. Most services were unavailable or partially unavailable, including card payments, transfers, ATM withdrawals, the trading platform and sign-ins, according to The Times and the Economic Times. The company said on X that “all our customers’ money and data are safe”. A person familiar with the matter told Reuters the Revolut outage was related to the Google Cloud disruption, the Economic Times and Bloomberg via the Hindu BusinessLine.

Lloyds said its app was online and logins normal, though some customers had problems with certain services; it was monitoring closely (The Times; Hindu BusinessLine). HSBC said customers were experiencing “difficulties accessing our services”, while Halifax said on X it was “aware some customers are having issues” with its app and website, neither confirming a link to Google Cloud (Arab News; Indian Express). Downdetector logged problems at Royal Bank of Scotland (Hindu BusinessLine), Royal Mail, DPD and Rightmove (Arab News; The Times), and ING Germany reported login and app problems (Economic Times). Budgeting app Emma was down from 7am UK time, saying: “This is a technical outage, not a security issue” (Hindu BusinessLine; Indian Express). HM Courts & Tribunals Service reported problems with its cloud video platform for some remote hearings, though it was unclear if these were linked to Google (The Times; Geo TV).

In July, HM Treasury designated four technology companies, including Google Cloud EMEA Limited, as critical third parties for the financial sector, jointly overseen by the Bank of England, the PRA and the FCA (Bank of England; FCA). In November 2025, EU regulators named 19 critical ICT third-party providers, including Google Cloud, under the Digital Operational Resilience Act (Mondaq; FStech).

Dr Amro Al-Said Ahmad, a computer science lecturer at Keele University, said the incident “highlights the dependency effect of modern cloud ecosystems”, warning that “when a core cloud region experiences failures, the impact extends far beyond the directly affected services … products that depend on those services can all experience cascading failures” (The Times). University of Surrey cybersecurity professor Alan Woodward said hyperscalers remain “susceptible to localized infrastructure failures” and that reliance on them is “intensifying with the AI boom” (Arab News).