Google Cloud Outage Knocks UK Banks, Websites and Court Systems Offline

A Google Cloud outage disrupted UK banks, business websites and court video links on Tuesday, October 20, after a power event hit its London infrastructure. Google later said most affected services had recovered, although a small number of customers still faced problems.

The incident began around 07:08 BST in europe-west2, Google’s London cloud region. Google identified a power event in the europe-west2-b zone and reported higher error rates and network failures across multiple services. Its public dashboard listed the incident as active during the afternoon.

Google Cloud Outage

Affected products included Cloud Run, Google App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine and Cloud Filestore. These services help businesses run applications, manage containers and store files. A failure across these layers can stop websites and apps even when their own software has not changed.

Google said the power event had been mitigated and engineers were prioritizing existing workloads. During recovery, customers could still face problems creating new workloads. Google did not immediately explain what caused the power event or provide a technical account.

Revolut reported disruption across several services, including card payments and ATM withdrawals. The bank said customers’ money and data remained safe. Halifax and HSBC also acknowledged service problems, while Lloyds said its apps and online logins were working but some online features were affected.

Not every reported problem was independently linked to Google Cloud. Lloyds did not initially confirm a direct connection, and reports on outage tracking websites alone cannot establish the cause of a service failure.

HM Courts and Tribunals Service confirmed problems with its Cloud Video Platform, used for remote hearings. The Criminal Bar Association said the platform had been down across large parts of England and Wales since 10:00 BST, preventing some trials and hearings from proceeding.

Some patients also lost access to appointment booking through the NHS app. According to BBC reporting, the problem involved a third-party appointment service used by some healthcare providers, rather than the entire app. That issue was resolved around midday.

DPD said its website connection issues had been resolved. Google’s afternoon update said the outage had been mitigated for most customers, while engineers continued working on remaining cases. The company promised an incident analysis after its investigation.

The disruption follows earlier incidents covered by CybersecurityNews, including Google’s API management outage and the major AWS outage. Those events had different causes but showed how shared infrastructure can spread disruption across unrelated businesses.

For affected organizations, the question is whether backup arrangements can keep essential services running when a cloud location fails. Google’s findings should clarify what went wrong and the steps needed to reduce the risk of another widespread outage.

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