Status as of 20 October 2026, 15:25 BST (14:25 UTC): Resolved. Google closed the Europe-West2 incident on its Google Cloud status page at 15:00 BST (07:00 PDT), almost eight hours after it began. Google says the problem is mitigated for most customers but is still affecting a very small number of customers, whom it is handling through support cases.
Some companies that run on Google Cloud may take longer to clear backlogs and restore all features. If an app is still misbehaving, you can check and report it on Downbits’ Google Cloud status page.
A power failure inside Google Cloud’s London data centre region knocked Revolut’s app and cards offline across Europe on Tuesday, 20 October 2026, and disrupted online services at HSBC, Lloyds, Halifax, Royal Mail, DPD, Rightmove and Screwfix throughout most of the UK morning. Google says a “power event” took down its Europe-West2-B zone at 07:08 BST (06:08 UTC) and caused elevated errors and intermittent network failures across 38 cloud products in the wider London region.
Google did not offer a workaround for the first two and a half hours, then told customers to move affected workloads to another zone or region “if feasible.” The company said shortly after noon that the power issue was fixed, and it closed the incident at 15:00 BST, 7 hours and 52 minutes after the failure began. It has promised an analysis once its internal investigation is complete, but has not yet explained what failed or why problems spread beyond a single zone.
What caused the Google Cloud outage?
Google Cloud attributes the disruption to a power problem in Europe-West2-B, one of three availability zones in its London region. An availability zone is a separate data centre facility with its own power, cooling and networking, designed so that a failure in one building does not take down the others. Google’s status page states plainly that services in Europe-West2-B were unavailable, while workloads elsewhere in the region saw elevated errors and network drops.
“A power event caused an outage within europe-west2-b zone,” Google wrote in its 12:58 BST update, adding that the event had been mitigated. When The Register asked for more detail, Google pointed back to the status page. The company has not said whether the fault involved grid supply, backup generators or on-site electrical equipment, and no post-incident report has been published yet.
Network monitoring backs up Google’s timeline. Cloudflare Radar, which tracks connection quality to major cloud providers, recorded a sharp rise in connection failures to europe-west2 from about 06:00 UTC.
Which Google Cloud services were affected?
Google’s incident page lists 38 products in the London region, covering most of the building blocks companies use to run their apps. They include Google Compute Engine (virtual machines), Google Kubernetes Engine (container hosting), Cloud Run, App Engine, Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, AlloyDB for PostgreSQL, Bigtable, Firestore, BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Persistent Disk, Pub/Sub, Memorystore for Redis, Valkey, Managed Service for Apache Kafka, Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud NAT and Virtual Private Cloud networking.
Google said Looker Studio was not affected, and a separate incident was opened for Google Security Operations (SIEM and SOAR) customers in the same region.
The outage was confined to London. Google’s dashboard showed no serious issues in other regions, so reports of disruption elsewhere in Europe trace back to companies whose systems are hosted in, or depend on, the London region.
Is Revolut down, and which other companies were hit?
Revolut was the most heavily affected consumer service. Its status page showed card payments, ATM withdrawals, transfers, sign-in, identity verification, in-app chat support, and stock and crypto trading were either down or only partly working. Customers across Europe reported failed card payments at tills and an app that would not load. Revolut runs its infrastructure on Google Cloud, and a person familiar with the matter told Reuters the bank’s outage was linked to the Google disruption. Revolut has not officially named Google as the cause.
The bank said on X that it had been working on the problem since the morning and that “all our customers’ money and data are safe.” Revolut says it has around 80 million customers worldwide; it has not said how many were affected. Live user reports for the app are on Downbits’ Revolut status page.
Halifax acknowledged that some customers were experiencing issues with its app and online banking and suggested calling the bank if needed. Lloyds said its app was running normally, but some customers had trouble with certain online services, according to Reuters.
Outage trackers also showed spikes for HSBC, Bank of Scotland, Royal Mail, DPD, Rightmove, Screwfix, BT, NHS England, Gov.UK and Asda. DPD confirmed connection issues with its website, and Royal Mail parcel tracking loaded slowly or not at all, though there were no reports of physical deliveries stopping.
The disruption reached the courts as well. HM Courts and Tribunals Service said its Cloud Video Platform, used for remote hearings and livestreams, was down, and the judge in a trial at Southwark Crown Court noted “problems with Google” before the system came back.
Budgeting app Emma said it was offline because of the Google Cloud outage and stressed it was a technical failure, not a security incident. Spotify saw a short spike in reports around 12:50 BST that cleared within half an hour; Spotify runs on Google Cloud, but it has not said whether the two were connected.
A Downing Street spokesperson told Sky News that No. 10 was aware of the outage and in contact with Google Cloud.
How the outage unfolded
Google logged the start of the incident at 07:08 BST (23:08 PDT on Monday, 19 October). Its first public update, at 09:35 BST, described elevated errors and intermittent network failures across multiple services and said there was no workaround. At 10:24 BST, Google added advice to migrate workloads to another zone or region where possible and confirmed that Looker Studio was unaffected.
The noon update still said engineers were investigating. At 12:12 BST, Google identified the power event in europe-west2-b, said it had been mitigated, and expected partial recovery of infrastructure services within 30 minutes. At 12:58 BST, it reported that services were recovering, said it was prioritising existing workloads over new ones, and gave a tentative full-recovery time of 14:00 BST. At 13:44 BST, Google said most workloads in Europe-West2 had been recovering since 13:10 BST; by then, outage reports for Rightmove, Halifax and NHS services had already started to fall, while Revolut’s stayed elevated longer than most. Google posted its final update at 15:03 BST, recording the incident’s end as 15:00 BST. It said the issue was mitigated for most customers, that a very small number were still affected and should open support cases, and that no further updates would be posted on the status page.
Is my money safe, and is this a cyberattack?
Nothing published so far points to a cyberattack or data breach. Google attributes the outage to a power failure, and both Revolut and Emma described the disruption as technical. Revolut says customer funds and data were not affected.
If a card payment failed during the outage, check your transaction history once the app is working again before trying the payment a second time, so you don’t end up paying twice. Outages like this also tend to bring phishing texts and emails offering “refunds” or asking customers to “verify” their accounts; Revolut, HSBC and Lloyds will not ask for your PIN or passcode by message.
Why could one zone disrupt so much
Cloud regions are split into zones so that losing one building leaves the others running. In practice, companies that run a service in only one zone, or that depend on a supplier that does, lose that service when the zone goes down. Engineers on Reddit’s sysadmin forum described the pattern as one zone going down and taking with it any service not built for high availability. Google’s own advice during the incident, to move workloads elsewhere, assumes customers have that option ready.
Dr Amro Al-Said Ahmad, a computer science lecturer at Keele University, told The Register that a failure in a core cloud region can cascade through applications, payment platforms and third-party software several layers removed from the original fault. “Resilience is not achieved by simply moving to the cloud,” he said, pointing to multi-region deployments and tested disaster recovery plans as the fix.
This is not the first incident in Google’s London region. A cooling failure took down one London zone during the UK’s record heatwave in July 2022, and a configuration change made most virtual machines in Europe-West2-A unreachable for more than an hour in December 2020. Tuesday’s outage also comes almost exactly a year after the October 2025 Amazon Web Services outage, which disrupted services at Lloyds and other UK firms.
With services back, several questions remain open. Google has not said what the power event was, why errors spread to zones that did not lose power, or when it will publish the incident analysis it has promised; for past regional outages, Google has posted a preliminary report within days and a full root-cause analysis later. Revolut has not said how many customers lost access or when every feature was restored. HSBC, Rightmove, DPD, NHS England and Royal Mail did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment on the cause. If any of these services is still giving you trouble, you can check and report it on Downbits, which tracks outages across banking, delivery and cloud platforms.
Updates
2026-10-20, 15:25 BST: Google closed the incident at 15:00 BST (07:00 PDT) after 7 hours and 52 minutes, saying it is mitigated for most customers with a very small number still affected. Google will publish an incident analysis later. Revolut has not yet confirmed that all of its features are back.
2026-10-20, 14:40 BST: First published. Google reports the power event mitigated and most workloads are recovering; final all-clear not yet posted.
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