Google Cloud resolved a power failure at its London data centre on Tuesday that disrupted services for major UK banks, government courts, Royal Mail, delivery firms and hundreds of smaller businesses for several hours.
The company reported an "issue with multiple services" at its europe-west2 cloud region early Tuesday morning. The outage stemmed from a power event in one of its smaller data centre zones, europe-west2-b. Google Cloud published no timeline for resolution in its initial statement but confirmed the disruption had ended by evening.
Revolut, Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Halifax and Bank of Scotland all reported disruption to online banking services. More than 1,500 Revolut customers flagged issues by 08:00 BST. Revolut later confirmed some services were disrupted and said customer money and data remained safe throughout. Lloyds confirmed by Tuesday evening that root issues had been resolved.
Beyond banking, the outage affected Royal Mail, parcel delivery service DPD, e-bike service Forest and the HM Courts and Tribunals Service's video platform for remote hearings. The Veg Box Company, a small fresh produce business, could not access its website to download customer orders or book parcels with DPD. Guy Baybutt, the company's representative, told the BBC the disruption posed serious financial consequences for small businesses unable to absorb lost revenue during peak trading hours.
Individual customers reported severe inconvenience. Revolut user Rachael Ellen, 25, said she could not pay for parking at a shopping centre and could not view incoming transactions or confirm when a relative's payment would arrive.
Cloud computing infrastructure from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud underpins many online platforms through regional data centre complexes. Prof Feng Li, associate dean for research and innovation at Bayes Business School, said the outage highlighted how deeply economies depend on a handful of cloud providers. "Large cloud systems are complex, and failures will happen. What matters is how far they spread, how quickly services recover and whether customers have workable alternatives," he said. Google Cloud said it would publish a full incident analysis on its service health dashboard.
Tuesday's disruption occurred exactly one year after an AWS outage knocked more than 1,000 UK sites offline.