A major power failure inside Google Cloud’s europe-west2-b availability zone in London knocked multiple UK financial institutions offline on Tuesday, 20 October, including Revolut, Lloyds, HSBC and Halifax. Google’s incident record shows the disruption began at 07:08 BST and lasted seven hours and 52 minutes, with recovery underway by approximately 13:10 BST and the incident closed around 15:00 BST. The company described elevated errors, intermittent network failures and unavailable services, affecting products such as Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage and App Engine. Google said the event originated at a third-party facility and was an infrastructure and power issue, not a cyberattack.
Revolut’s crypto and payment services were directly hit. The fintech reported interruptions to account sign-ins, card payments, transfers, ATM withdrawals, identity verification, customer support, currency exchange, and stock and cryptocurrency trading. Reuters said that at 17:00 GMT on Tuesday only six of 27 Revolut UK service categories were functioning normally, with card payments, cash withdrawals and trading still affected. Revolut told customers their money and data remained safe, framing the problem as availability rather than compromise. The company has more than 80 million retail customers globally and about 13 million in the UK.
The outage exposed concentration risk across financial infrastructure. Lloyds, Halifax, HSBC and Bank of Scotland acknowledged online banking problems, while UK courts, Royal Mail, DPD and Rightmove also reported disruptions. Dr Hamza Mutaher of Birmingham City University told CX Today that apparently independent businesses can rely on the same underlying cloud infrastructure, allowing one shared failure to disrupt many customer-facing services at once. Google has not yet published a final root-cause analysis, but its forthcoming post-incident report is expected to explain why a single-zone power event created wider regional disruption.
Regulators are now examining the incident as an early test of the UK’s critical third-party regime. The Financial Conduct Authority said it was engaging with Google and affected firms. The Prudential Regulation Authority was also seeking information, the European Banking Authority contacted Google Cloud to assess implications for EU financial institutions, and the Treasury Committee asked the Bank of England and FCA for details on the response and any financial harm. Under the regime that took effect in July 2026, Google Cloud EMEA Limited is one of four designated critical third-party providers, alongside AWS, Microsoft and Oracle. The FCA’s operational resilience rules also require financial firms to stay within impact tolerances even when an external technology provider fails.
For Revolut, the outage follows its 19 October announcement that it secured Gibraltar approval for international cryptocurrency operations covering trading, custody and staking. The timing sharpens questions about how shared infrastructure dependencies affect expansion into digital assets. Alphabet’s next earnings are due on 28 October, and Google Cloud’s reliability, remediation costs and customer confidence are likely to be areas of investor focus after Q2 2026 cloud revenue rose 82% year over year to $24.8 billion.
