Google Cloud Outage Disrupts UK Courts, Banks and Millions of Users
A power fault at Google's London data center knocked Lloyds, HSBC and Revolut offline, stalling court hearings and blocking payments.
A power failure at Google's London cloud infrastructure triggered widespread disruption across the United Kingdom on Tuesday, leaving millions of bank customers unable to make or transfer payments and forcing courts to halt proceedings while systems remained offline.
Google attributed the incident to a "power event" affecting its europe-west2-b zone, a London-based node within its global Cloud computing network. The company said services were restored for most users, though the outage exposed how deeply public institutions and financial firms have come to depend on third-party cloud infrastructure.
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Major retail banks including Lloyds and HSBC, along with the digital banking platform Revolut, were among the institutions affected. Customers reported being locked out of accounts and unable to complete transactions during the disruption, a scenario that regulators in the UK have increasingly flagged as a systemic risk tied to cloud concentration.
The impact extended beyond the financial sector, with UK courts reporting stalled hearings as digital case management tools went dark. The simultaneous failure across courts and banking services underscores the cascading consequences a single infrastructure fault can trigger when government services and private platforms share the same underlying cloud provider.
Google did not immediately provide a timeline for a full post-incident review. Continue reading at Business | The Guardian.
