Google Cloud Outage Disrupts UK Banks; Services Restored
Google Cloud outage in London on Oct. 20 disrupted Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC, drew FCA engagement and underscored cloud concentration risk for UK financials.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- A London-region Google Cloud outage disrupted payments, transfers and logins at Revolut, Lloyds, Halifax and HSBC.
- Google blamed a power event in europe-west2-b and said most customers were recovering.
- The FCA engaged with Google and affected firms to assess impact and resilience risks.
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A Google Cloud outage in its London-based europe-west2 region disrupted apps and payments at Revolut, Lloyds, Halifax, and HSBC on Oct. 20, 2026. The incident triggered UK bank outages that interrupted customer transactions, transfers, and online logins across multiple firms. Google attributed the disruption to a power event and said most customers were recovering. The UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) engaged with Google and affected firms to assess the impact.
Banks and Services Disrupted
Revolut reported interruptions to card payments, transfers, ATM withdrawals, card top-ups, its trading platform, and customer sign-ins. The company confirmed that customer money and data were safe.
Lloyds Banking Group said customers of Lloyds, Halifax, and Bank of Scotland experienced problems with some online banking functions. Lloyds added that its app and some customer logins were operating normally for some users, but certain online services remained affected.
HSBC acknowledged that some customers had difficulty accessing services and said it was monitoring the incident.
Other affected or potentially affected services included couriers DPD, property listings site Rightmove, Royal Mail, the NHS app, and the HM Courts & Tribunals Service’s Cloud Video Platform. Available reports did not confirm that every disruption was caused by Google Cloud.
Cause, Recovery, and Oversight
The outage began around 07:00 BST (02:00 ET) in Google Cloud’s europe-west2 region, whose infrastructure is based in London. Google’s status page logged elevated errors and intermittent network failures in the europe-west2-b availability zone.
Google said in a status update, “Due to a power event we had suffered an outage within europe-west2-b zone.” The company said the power event had been mitigated and prioritized recovery of existing workloads. Most customers were recovering during the day, with only a very small number still affected. Later, Google reported full service availability had been restored, though some third-party platforms continued to report interruptions.
The FCA said it was aware of the incident and was engaging with Google and affected firms to understand the impact. No enforcement action, formal investigation, operational-resilience order, penalty, or remediation deadline was reported.
Google said it would publish a post-incident analysis after completing an internal investigation. Lloyds said it expected all services to return to normal soon after resolving the root issues.
