A Google Cloud outage in London disrupted banking and public services on October 20, 2026, with Revolut reporting that most services, including card payments and ATM withdrawals, were unavailable or only partly accessible. Google said most cloud workloads recovered that afternoon; a preliminary review published on October 22 traced the disruption to a power interruption and failed backup-generator controls.
Key Takeaways
- Google recorded six hours and 10 minutes of disruption in its London cloud region.
- Revolut reported widespread service problems, while disruptions were also reported at other banks and public services.
- Google Cloud EMEA was already subject to the UK's critical third-party oversight regime before the outage.
Table of Contents
- Google Cloud outage traced to backup-power failure
- Banking and public-service disruptions
- Shared cloud suppliers were already under closer oversight
- Conclusion
Google Cloud outage traced to backup-power failure
Google's preliminary incident review said an electrical power interruption affected the facility hosting europe-west2-b, one availability zone within its London region. Both primary and backup automation controllers failed to start and transfer the load to emergency generators. Servers, networking equipment and storage systems went offline after battery reserves ran out.
The company's London outage incident record puts the disruption between 07:00 and 13:10 British Summer Time on October 20. Most workloads had recovered by the end of that period, although a small number required further attention. Google posted its closure notification at 15:03 BST.
The physical power failure was confined to one zone, but its effects spread across the region. Workloads redirected to unaffected zones increased demand on available capacity, while requests to components in the offline zone timed out. That meant some customers using regional or multi-zone configurations also experienced errors and delays.
| Item | Details |
|---|---|
| Compute | Google Compute Engine and Google Kubernetes Engine were among the affected products. |
| Databases | Affected services included Cloud SQL, AlloyDB and Cloud Bigtable. |
| Analytics | BigQuery and Looker experienced disruption. |
| Storage | Google listed Cloud Storage and Persistent Disk among impacted services. |
Banking and public-service disruptions
Alongside Revolut's statement, online banking problems were reported at ING Germany and Halifax. Disruptions were also reported for services connected to Lloyds, HSBC, Rightmove, DPD, NHS England and Royal Mail.
Google's technical account does not independently confirm the effects at each named organization. Its cloud recovery times should therefore not be read as confirmation that every affected banking or public service returned to normal at the same moment.
Shared cloud suppliers were already under closer oversight
The incident illustrates the operational risk of multiple financial institutions depending on shared technology suppliers: disruption at one provider can affect several customer-facing services at once.
Britain designated Google Cloud EMEA Limited as a Critical Third Party effective July 13, 2026. The regime brings critical financial-sector services under joint oversight by the Bank of England, Prudential Regulation Authority and Financial Conduct Authority. It covers those systemic services rather than the provider's wider operations, and financial firms remain responsible for managing supplier risks.
The available material does not establish a financial cost to Alphabet, Google's parent company, or any new regulatory action resulting from this outage.
Conclusion
Most Google Cloud workloads recovered on October 20, but the October 22 findings remained preliminary. Google said it would publish a final incident report with preventative actions once its investigation was complete.
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