On 20 October 2026, a disruption in Google Cloud’s infrastructure in London caused widespread failures in online banking and payment systems at several major British banks, including Revolut, Lloyds, Halifax and HSBC. The cause was a “power event” in a zone of Google Cloud’s only UK region.
The problems began around 07:00 am. Google recorded elevated errors and intermittent network failures across multiple services, including Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run, Cloud Storage, App Engine and others. The company reported that power had been restored, services were gradually recovering, and full recovery was expected around 2:00 pm. Customers were advised to migrate workloads to other zones or regions where possible.
Digital bank Revolut was among the hardest hit: users were unable to make card payments, top up accounts, withdraw cash from ATMs or exchange currency. The bank confirmed that customers’ money and data remained safe and linked the outage to issues at a third-party provider. According to Downdetector, the number of complaints about Revolut exceeded 1,500 already in the morning hours.
Traditional banks were also affected. Customers of Lloyds, Halifax (part of Lloyds Banking Group), HSBC and Bank of Scotland reported problems accessing apps and online banking, as well as difficulties making payments. Users complained that cards were being declined at supermarkets and petrol stations. The banks acknowledged the technical issues and said they were working to restore services.
Beyond banking, the incident disrupted court video links in England and Wales (HMCTS Cloud Video Platform), Royal Mail, the delivery company DPD, the property website Rightmove and other services. The outage once again highlighted the high dependence of the UK’s critical infrastructure on cloud providers: europe-west2 is Google Cloud’s only region in the country, so a local failure quickly spreads to many British companies.
Google apologised to all those affected and continued to update the status on its Cloud Service Health page. European regulators have long been concerned about the risks of concentrating critical services with a small number of cloud providers — today’s incident provided another clear example of those risks.
