One Power Glitch at a Google Data Center in London Took Down Revolut, Lloyds, HSBC and Even UK Court Hearings

A power problem at a single facility in Google Cloud's London region stopped a big slice of British finance on Tuesday morning. Revolut customers could not pay by card, move money or withdraw cash. Lloyds, Halifax, Bank of Scotland and HSBC users hit errors. Even the video platform for remote court hearings ran into trouble.

It happened exactly one year after an AWS outage knocked UK banks offline, and it makes the same point again: a lot of the economy now runs through a handful of cloud companies.

What broke

Google first reported an "issue with multiple services" in europe-west2, its London region, early on Tuesday, describing "elevated errors and intermittent network failures." The Independent says trouble started late Monday evening. Google later traced it to a "power event" in one of its smaller zones, europe-west2-b.

By Tuesday evening the company said it had "resolved a disruption to Google Cloud services at a third-party facility in our europe-west2 cloud region due to a power event" and that services had been restored. It plans to publish an incident analysis on its service health dashboard. What caused the power problem itself is still not clear.

Banks, apps and couriers

Revolut was the most visible casualty. More than 1,500 people reported problems on Downdetector shortly after 08:00 BST, covering card payments, transfers, cash withdrawals and signing in. The company said customers' money and data were safe, and later that "services are now fully restored" and that money and data "remained safe throughout."

Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland, all part of Lloyds Banking Group, and HSBC customers reported problems too. Lloyds did not confirm the cause but said "we understand the root issues have been resolved." Halifax told customers on X it was "aware some customers are having issues with our app and online."

Budgeting app Emma was blunter. It said it was down "due to a Google Cloud outage affecting services in London since 7am," adding that it was a technical outage, not a security issue.

The damage reached well beyond banking. Royal Mail, DPD, Rightmove and e-bike service Forest were affected, and HM Courts and Tribunals Service said it was aware of an issue with the video platform used for remote hearings.

The people on the other end

For customers, it came down to small, annoying failures. "Today I was unable to pay for my parking at a shopping centre because my Revolut account wasn't working properly," Rachael Ellen, 25, from Glasgow, told the BBC.

For small businesses, it cost money. Guy Baybutt of The Veg Box Company in Preston could not process orders or book DPD collections, and lost sales. "We don't have the resources of larger companies to simply absorb lost revenue, particularly when we're dealing with fresh, perishable produce," he said.

A year after AWS

Exactly a year earlier, more than 1,000 sites, UK banks among them, went dark for hours when AWS's largest cloud site failed. This time the provider was different and the result was the same. Revolut, which is now chasing a US national bank charter, lost card payments and logins because a facility it does not run lost power.

"Google Cloud's outage is a reminder of how deeply our economies depend on just a handful of cloud providers," said Professor Feng Li of Bayes Business School. "Large cloud systems are complex, and failures will happen. What matters is how far they spread, how quickly services recover and whether customers have workable alternatives."

On Tuesday morning, for a Revolut customer trying to pay for parking in Glasgow, there wasn't one.

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