A power-related outage at Google Cloud’s London infrastructure disrupted Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC on 20 October, Mint reported. The failure affected withdrawals and transfers, as well as customers’ access to banking services. It also reached businesses and remote court hearings.
Key points
- Google attributed the disruption to a power event in its London cloud infrastructure.
- The incident affected 38 Google Cloud products in the region.
- Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC reported problems for customers.
- Google closed the incident at 15:00 BST, with a small number of customers still affected.
Google Cloud’s europe-west2-b goes down at 0608 UTC
Google put the start of the incident at 0608 GMT. At 1210 GMT, Google said normal operation had resumed for the majority of services, roughly six hours into the outage. Its service update described workloads recovering in europe-west2, the Google Cloud region serving London.
The failure centred on europe-west2-b, one of three availability zones in the London region, The Register reported. The zones are intended to help protect customers against hardware or regional failures. During the outage, Google reported elevated errors and intermittent network failures across the wider region.
Google’s incident page listed 38 affected products, Cyberkendra reported. They included Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run, App Engine, BigQuery and Cloud Storage — services used for computing, running applications, analysing data and storing files. The affected products spanned more than one kind of workload.
Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC report problems
Revolut customers had trouble with ATM withdrawals, transfers and card top-ups. The bank said it was working to resolve the disruption and apologised to customers. Its spokesperson said customers’ money and data were safe, Mint reported.
Revolut’s status page also showed problems with card payments, sign-in, identity verification, in-app support and stock and crypto trading, Cyberkendra reported. Some services were unavailable and others were only partly working. A recovery in cloud infrastructure did not by itself tell customers which banking functions they could use.
Lloyds confirmed that customers had difficulty accessing its services and said on the afternoon of 20 October that it expected them to return to normal following resolution of the underlying issues, Mint reported. HSBC also reported access problems for customers and said it would keep monitoring the situation, which was affecting other organisations.
Remote hearings affected before Google closed incident
Reports of disruption extended to Royal Mail, DPD and Rightmove. Downdetector recorded hundreds of reports of problems at UK businesses, including those three organisations. Reports on an outage tracker show what users were experiencing, rather than identifying the cause of every interruption.
HM Courts and Tribunals Service said its Cloud Video Platform, used for remote hearings and livestreams, was down, Cyberkendra reported. The interruption therefore reached a public service as well as banks, delivery companies and a property website.
Google closed the europe-west2 incident at 15:00 BST on 20 October, seven hours and 52 minutes after it began. Google said the problem had been mitigated for most customers, while it was handling the very small number still affected through support cases.
