The Google Cloud outage that affected UK services, including Lloyds Banking Group and Revolut, was largely resolved on October 20, 2026, after disruption in its London region. Google reported recovery for most workloads by 13:10 BST, but its closing update said a very small number of customers remained affected.
Key Takeaways
- The main disruption lasted six hours and 10 minutes in Google Cloud’s London region.
- A preliminary investigation identified a power interruption and failed backup-generator automation.
- Recovery of the cloud platform did not establish that every affected customer’s services had fully returned.
Table of Contents
- Google Cloud outage recovery left some customers affected
- Power failure spread beyond one availability zone
- Banking impact remains unquantified
- Conclusion
Google Cloud outage recovery left some customers affected
Google’s London-region incident record puts the disruption between 07:00 and 13:10 BST on October 20. Its 15:03 BST closing update said the issue had been mitigated for most customers, while engineers continued working with a small number still experiencing problems.
Lloyds Banking Group, Revolut and court operations were among those affected by the disruption. The available information does not establish which banking functions were unavailable, how many customers were affected or when each institution completed its own recovery.
That distinction matters: restoration of underlying cloud infrastructure is not the same as confirmation that every application running on it has resumed normal service.
| Item | Details |
|---|---|
| Affected region | London, europe-west2 |
| Direct power-loss location | Availability zone europe-west2-b |
| Reported service symptoms | Elevated errors, API timeouts and processing delays |
| Affected products | Included BigQuery, Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine and Cloud SQL |
Power failure spread beyond one availability zone
In a preliminary incident report posted on October 22, Google said an electrical interruption hit the facility hosting availability zone europe-west2-b. Automation controllers failed to start and transfer the load to emergency generators, leaving equipment dependent on backup batteries until those reserves were exhausted.
Servers, networking hardware and storage systems then went offline. Workloads shifted toward other availability zones, creating capacity pressure, processing queues and timeouts beyond the facility that lost power.
Google said engineers redirected traffic away from offline infrastructure, adjusted resource allocations and progressively restarted services. The preliminary findings remained subject to change as its investigation continued.
Banking impact remains unquantified
For financial institutions, the incident illustrates how a cloud infrastructure failure can interrupt customer-facing operations even when the immediate fault is outside the bank. It also shows why the location of workloads and their dependencies matter during a recovery.
The supplied information does not quantify financial losses for Lloyds or Revolut. Nor does Google’s incident record identify individual affected customers, so its technical recovery timeline should not be treated as a bank-by-bank service restoration record.
Conclusion
Most workloads recovered on October 20, but the extent of the banking disruption remains unquantified. Google said it would publish a final incident report with preventive actions once its investigation was complete.
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