One power failure in London knocked UK banks, couriers and courts offline
A power failure in Google Cloud's only UK region disrupted Revolut, Lloyds, HSBC, Royal Mail and the courts' video platform before services recovered.
The skim
- A power failure in one zone of Google Cloud's London region on Tuesday morning disrupted UK banks, delivery firms and the courts' remote-hearing video platform.
- Revolut, Lloyds, HSBC, Royal Mail and DPD were among the services customers reported problems with; Google says services have since been restored.
- europe-west2 is Google's only UK cloud region, so customers without a multi-region setup had no nearby fallback.
What happened
Trouble started shortly after 7am UK time on Tuesday, October 20, when the europe-west2-b availability zone, one of three zones in Google Cloud's London region, lost power. Google's status updates first described "elevated errors and intermittent network failures" across the region before pinning the cause on a "power event," according to the BBC.
The fallout spread quickly. Customers reported problems with Revolut, Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Halifax and Bank of Scotland, as well as Royal Mail, DPD and e-bike service Forest. HM Courts and Tribunals Service said the video platform it uses for remote hearings was affected. Downdetector logged more than 1,500 Revolut reports shortly after 8am, the BBC said.
Google said the power issue was mitigated around midday and reported recovery for most workloads by mid-afternoon. Computer Weekly's timeline notes that the Ministry of Justice said its systems were still not fully restored by late afternoon. By Tuesday evening, a Google Cloud spokesperson told the BBC the disruption at "a third-party facility" had been resolved and that services were restored. Revolut said customers' money and data stayed safe throughout.
Why it didn't just fail over
Cloud regions are split into zones so that one can pick up the slack when another goes down. Engineers posting during the incident, quoted by Computer Weekly, said the other two London zones didn't fully absorb the load, and that backup generators failed to kick in when mains power dropped. Those are secondhand accounts; Google has said it will publish a formal incident analysis once its internal investigation wraps up.
There's also a geography problem. europe-west2 is Google's only UK region, so organizations that wanted or needed their workloads hosted in Britain, and hadn't built resilience across regions, had nowhere local to move them.
Why it matters
This is the second big cloud wobble to hit UK banking in a year. The BBC notes it came exactly one year after an AWS outage knocked more than 1,000 sites offline, UK banks among them. Each time, the lesson is the same: a huge share of everyday services runs on a few hyperscalers, and one failure in one building can ripple out to card payments, parcel deliveries and court hearings.
For businesses, the takeaway is architectural rather than about any single vendor. Running in multiple zones is table stakes. For anything critical, it's worth testing whether those zones really fail over, and whether a second region, or a second provider, is worth the cost. Small firms have the least cushion: one UK produce seller told the BBC it couldn't process orders or book couriers for most of the day.
