European Regulators Probe Google After Cloud Outage Disrupts Major Banks

Key points

• European financial regulators have launched an inquiry into Google regarding a recent cloud outage that impacted major banking institutions.
• The disruption stemmed from a power event at a Google Cloud data center in the Europe-west2 region, specifically affecting London-based infrastructure.
• Major financial entities, including Revolut, HSBC, and Lloyds, experienced service interruptions that prevented customers from accessing funds or processing payments.
• Google confirmed the core infrastructure issue was resolved by midday, though some customers continued to experience errors into the afternoon.
• The incident has highlighted concerns regarding the heavy reliance of global financial systems on a limited number of centralized cloud providers.

Background

This development follows a significant outage on October 20, 2026, which began around 6:08 GMT. The power event at the Google Cloud London data center caused widespread disruptions for financial and non-financial services, including Rightmove and Royal Mail. Previous reports indicated that while Google mitigated the core issue by 10:00 AM ET, residual problems persisted for some users, causing frustration among those unable to complete transactions. The current regulatory inquiry represents a formal response to these operational failures and the broader implications for financial stability.

Why it matters

The regulatory probe underscores the growing risk associated with the concentration of critical financial infrastructure in the hands of a few tech giants. If cloud providers experience failures, the cascading effects can be severe for the banking sector and consumers. This event may lead to stricter compliance requirements for financial institutions to diversify their cloud dependencies or implement more robust failover mechanisms to ensure continuity of service during infrastructure disruptions.

What to watch

Regulators are expected to review Google's incident response and infrastructure resilience measures. Financial institutions may accelerate efforts to diversify their cloud service providers to reduce single points of failure. Google is likely to face increased scrutiny regarding its data center power management and redundancy systems in European regions. The outcome of this inquiry could influence future regulatory frameworks for cloud service reliability in the financial sector.