A power outage at a Google Cloud data centre near London disrupted banking and online services across the UK on Tuesday, affecting customers of Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC, as well as other businesses.
The US technology giant said the incident began at 0608 GMT and affected multiple cloud services in its London-based europe-west2 region.
In a service update, Google attributed the disruption to a “power event” and initially estimated that full recovery would be achieved around 1300 GMT on Tuesday.
The outage caused problems with several digital banking services, including ATM withdrawals, bank transfers and card top-ups on Revolut.
A source close to the matter attributed the disruption to the Google Cloud failures.
Lloyds and HSBC also confirmed that some customers were experiencing difficulties accessing their banking services.
Google Cloud Outage Affects Multiple Businesses
Google said in an earlier update that multiple services were experiencing elevated errors and intermittent network failures in the europe-west2 region.
The disruption extended beyond banking, with internet service tracker Downdetector recording hundreds of reports involving other businesses, including property website Rightmove and postal operator Royal Mail.
The incident highlighted the impact a disruption to a major cloud computing provider can have on businesses that depend on its infrastructure to deliver online services.
Lloyds, HSBC Confirm Banking Problems
Lloyds acknowledged the disruption, saying it was aware that “some customers are having issues with our app and online banking”.
HSBC also confirmed that customers were experiencing “difficulties accessing our services”.
The bank said it would “monitor the situation, which is also affecting other organisations”.
Revolut Assures Customers Their Money Is Safe
Revolut said it had been working to resolve the issue since it was identified and apologised to customers affected by the disruption.
“We can confirm that all our customers’ money and data are safe,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
The outage affected several essential digital banking functions, including withdrawals, transfers and card top-ups.
Google initially expected services to recover fully by around 1300 GMT on Tuesday. The company’s update provided an estimated recovery time, but the information supplied did not confirm whether all affected services had returned to normal.
