The key facts

  • A power failure at a Google Cloud data centre near London caused disruptions for banks, retailers and delivery services
  • Affected were Revolut, Lloyds, HSBC, Screwfix, DPD, Rightmove and Royal Mail
  • Google expected full recovery by 13:00 GMT on Tuesday

Cause and scale of the outage

On Tuesday, October 20, an outage in Google Cloud infrastructure in Western Europe disrupted the operation of a number of online services in the UK and beyond. According to Anadolu, citing Downdetector, problems were experienced by banks Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC, retailer Screwfix and delivery service DPD. Euronews, citing a Google status update, reported that the cause was a power failure at a data centre near London. According to Google, the incident in the europe-west2 region began at 06:08 GMT on Tuesday; the company recorded an elevated number of errors and intermittent network failures.

Problems at banks

According to reports, millions of Revolut customers could not access their accounts or pay by card. The bank, which serves more than 80 million customers worldwide, including 13 million in the UK, reported a 'service outage'. According to Euronews, Revolut's ATM cash withdrawals, transfers and card top-ups were disrupted; a source close to the situation linked this to Google Cloud failures. A Revolut spokesperson said the bank had been working to fix the problem since it was identified, apologised to affected customers and confirmed that 'the money and data of all our customers are safe'. Lloyds said that 'some customers are having difficulties with our app and online banking'. HSBC confirmed 'difficulties accessing our services' and noted that the situation also affects other organisations.

Google's response and recovery

Google confirmed a problem affecting several services in its European data centres and said its engineering teams were working to restore full availability. The company apologised to affected customers and warned of possible connection failures and delays, including when accessing Google Security Operations. At the time of the incident there was no workaround, and the cause was being investigated. According to Euronews, Google expected full recovery by approximately 13:00 GMT on Tuesday. Downdetector also recorded hundreds of reports of problems at other companies, including the property website Rightmove and postal service Royal Mail.