London Power Event Disrupts Google Cloud, Halting UK Banking Services

Key points

• The outage started at 06:08 GMT on October 20, 2026, at a Google Cloud facility in the London area.
• Google attributed the failure to a 'power event' affecting the europe-west2 region.
• Major UK banks, including Revolut, Lloyds, and HSBC, confirmed widespread service disruptions for their customers.
• Non-financial services such as the property site Rightmove and Royal Mail also reported issues.
• Google announced the issue was 'mitigated' for most customers by late morning, with only a small number still affected.
• Revolut confirmed that customer funds and data were secure despite the operational failure.

Background

This incident highlights the critical dependency of global financial systems on a limited number of cloud infrastructure providers. Recent archive coverage notes that similar infrastructure vulnerabilities have been exposed in other regions, such as the 2026 drone strikes on Russian data centers, which disrupted services for major entities like Russian Railways. The current event underscores how a single physical failure in one data center can cascade into widespread digital outages across multiple industries.

How outlets are covering it

Euronews and The New York Times both report that the outage was caused by a 'power event' and that Google has largely resolved the issue, with NYT noting the recovery of services by early afternoon. Mashable emphasizes the lingering impact on banking institutions, noting that while Google closed the issue on its status page by 10:00 AM ET, banks like Revolut and HSBC continued to show errors later in the day. While Euronews focuses on the specific UK banks affected, Mashable highlights the potential global reach of the disruption, noting that Revolut’s US status page also displayed issues, though it is unclear if US customers were actually affected. All sources agree on the timeline and the primary cause but differ in their emphasis on the speed of recovery versus the persistence of downstream banking errors.

Why it matters

The incident demonstrates the fragility of modern digital infrastructure, where a single power failure can disrupt essential services for millions of users. It raises concerns about the concentration of cloud services and the resilience of financial systems that rely heavily on a few major providers. The event also highlights the need for robust contingency plans and diversified infrastructure to prevent such widespread outages in the future.

What to watch

Google is continuing to prioritize the recovery of remaining workloads, with its engineering team working on the small number of customers still experiencing issues. Affected banks are monitoring the situation and working to restore full functionality for their customers. The incident may prompt further scrutiny of cloud infrastructure resilience and the need for diversified service providers to mitigate the risk of single points of failure.