Google Cloud “power event” disrupts UK banks, Royal Mail and broadband providers

Halifax and Revolut were among many UK businesses affected by a “power event” that disrupted Google Cloud services on Tuesday 20 October.

Both the mortgage lender and the fintech said at lunchtime that they were working to restore their online services.

Revolut said it was “experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services,” but said customers’ money and data were safe.

Downdetector, which gathers user reports of website problems, logged problems at Royal Mail, broadband providers and banks, among others. The full number of companies affected is not yet clear.

Google said “multiple services” were “experiencing elevated errors and intermittent network failures” and that its engineers were looking into it.

Lloyds Banking Group, which owns Halifax, said: “We are aware of similar issues affecting other organisations and are monitoring the situation closely.”

In its latest update, at 12.30pm, Google said a “power event” was behind the problems with its web platform services. Its Cloud status page said it was still dealing with “an issue with multiple services.”

The statement said: “Due to a power event we had suffered an outage within europe-west2-b zone. The power event is mitigated.

“Partial mitigation to infrastructure services will be observed within the next 30 minutes and the remaining services will be mitigated there after.”

Google Cloud is one of a small number of very large cloud providers, along with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, that underpin much of the UK’s digital infrastructure.

Its europe-west2 zone is in London and is Google’s only UK cloud region, which meant serious problems for UK businesses that depend heavily on its services.

The incident follows a major AWS outage last October, when a fault in its biggest US data centre region took more than 1,000 sites offline, including UK banks.