Google Cloud services recover after London data center power outage disrupts Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC

A power outage at a Google Cloud data center near London disrupted services at several UK banks on Tuesday, affecting customers of Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC, as well as businesses including property website Rightmove and delivery services.

Google said the incident began at 06:08 GMT and was caused by a power-related event in its cloud infrastructure. By 12:10 GMT, most services had returned to normal, approximately six hours after the outage began.

In a service update, the US tech giant said it was seeing the recovery of most workloads in Europe-West2, the Google Cloud region serving London.

Google said it would publish a detailed report on the incident in the coming days.

Google Cloud outage: Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC affected

The outage affected several banking services, including ATM withdrawals, bank transfers and top-up cards for digital bank Revolut.

A Revolut spokesperson said the bank had been working to resolve the issue since it was identified and apologized to customers for the inconvenience.

“We can confirm that all of our customers’ money and data are safe,” the spokeswoman said.

British lender Lloyds also confirmed that customers had difficulty accessing its services. In a statement on Tuesday afternoon, the bank said it expects services to return to normal once the underlying issues are resolved.

“We understand that the root issues have been resolved so we expect all our services to be back to normal soon,” Lloyds said.

HSBC reported similar issues and said customers had difficulty accessing its services. The bank added that it will continue to monitor the situation, which also affects other organizations.

Rightmove, DPD and Royal Mail are reporting disruptions

The impact extended beyond banking. Internet service tracker Downdetector recorded hundreds of reports of problems affecting UK businesses, including Rightmove, delivery company DPD and postal service Royal Mail.

The incident highlighted how the failure of one cloud infrastructure provider can affect multiple organizations that rely on its services.

Cloud providers deliver computing power, storage and other IT resources to businesses on demand, reducing the need for companies to make significant investments in their own server infrastructure. However, disruptions to major providers can have far-reaching consequences when many businesses depend on the same systems.

Google Cloud outage renews fears over reliance on hyperscalers

The incident renewed concerns about the concentration of cloud computing infrastructure among a small number of large providers, commonly known as hyperscalers.

Local providers have lost market share in recent years as global technology companies have expanded their cloud operations.

According to Alan Woodward, professor of cyber security at the University of Surrey, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services are the three main hyperscalers with the infrastructure needed to handle large volumes of enterprise data in the UK.

Those data centers remain vulnerable to localized infrastructure failures, Woodward said, warning that such incidents can have a significant ripple effect when businesses rely on a handful of providers.

He added that the problem is intensifying amid the boom in artificial intelligence, which is increasing demand for cloud infrastructure and computing capacity.

The latest disruption follows a global outage that hit Amazon’s cloud services last year, disrupting online services used by video games, businesses and transport companies and knocking parts of the internet down for several hours.

As businesses increasingly move their operations to cloud platforms and expand the use of artificial intelligence, Tuesday’s incident underscores the importance of infrastructure resilience and contingency planning to limit the impact of outages.

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