Technology and Scienceupdated 1h ago2 min read
Google Cloud Power Event Disrupts UK Banks, Revolut, Halifax, And Court Live Streams
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Google Cloud London europe-west2-b power event disrupted UK banks and the courts. Revolut, Lloyds, HSBC and others affected; outage largely resolved by afternoon.
Power event knocks out cloud
Google Cloud said a "power event" at a London data centre disrupted cloud services across Europe for hours, affecting banks, websites and court live streams. Google Cloud said the incident began shortly after 6am UK time and that the disruption was isolated to a data centre in London, with services in parts of Europe experiencing "elevated errors and intermittent network issues".
Revolut said it was experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services, while Halifax told customers on X that they were "having issues with our app and online". The UK Courts and Tribunals Service said it was aware of an issue affecting Cloud Video Platform (CVP), used for some remote hearings, as the outage spread through online platforms.
Banks and remote hearings hit
Google Cloud said it had resolved the disruption at its UK cloud site that caused an outage affecting UK banks, businesses and the courts. Revolut told the BBC that it was experiencing an "issue with multiple services" and said it could confirm that all its customers’ money and data were safe.
Rachael Ellen, a Revolut customer from Glasgow, told the BBC that she was left unable to access her money, saying, "Today I was unable to pay for my parking at a shopping centre because my Revolut account wasn't working properly." The HM Courts and Tribunals Service said it was aware of an issue affecting the video platform used for remote hearings, and the criminal bar association reported that prosecution and defence barristers could not "proceed with trials and other hearings" after the service went down at 10am.
Regulators watch reliance risks
UK and EU regulators focused on the financial sector’s growing dependence on a small number of external technology providers, particularly cloud firms that support critical banking services. The UK Financial Conduct Authority said, "We are aware of an incident affecting services provided by Google and […] engaging with them and affected firms to understand the impact," as the outage highlighted how core services can fail when a provider has a problem.
In July, the UK brought Google Cloud, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Oracle under direct regulatory oversight as critical third-party suppliers to the financial sector, citing the risk that an outage at a major provider could disrupt multiple firms at once. Google Cloud said it would publish an analysis of the incident on its service health dashboard, while Google also told customers that the issue with impacted GCP products had been mitigated for most of the customers and was believed to be affecting a very small number.