Google Cloud London Outage Hits Revolut, UK Banks and Court Video Links; Google Blames a 'Power Event'

SentiSense · Published Oct 20, 2026, 6:06 AM ET · Updated Oct 20, 2026, 12:24 PM ET

A power event in one zone of Google Cloud's London region (europe-west2) disrupted services on October 20, knocking out card payments and ATM withdrawals at Revolut and coinciding with app problems at Lloyds, Halifax and HSBC and a failure of the courts' remote-hearing video platform. Google's status page logged the incident at just under eight hours before declaring it mitigated for most customers. The episode puts cloud concentration risk in UK financial services back in focus.

Alphabet's (GOOGL) Google Cloud suffered an outage in its London region on Tuesday, October 20, that rippled through UK banking and public services. Google's status dashboard traced it to "a power event" that caused an outage within the europe-west2-b zone, one of three availability zones in the London region. The incident ran from 06:08 UTC (07:08 in London) to 14:00 UTC, a span the dashboard puts at 7 hours and 52 minutes, and listed 38 affected Google Cloud products.

Revolut was the most visible casualty. Its status page showed most services unavailable or partially unavailable, including card payments and ATM withdrawals, and the fintech said all customers' money and data were safe. Reuters reported, citing an unnamed source, that the Revolut disruption stemmed from the Google outage. Lloyds, Bank of Scotland, Halifax and HSBC also acknowledged that some customers had trouble with apps and online banking, though the BBC reported it was not confirmed whether the Lloyds problems were linked to Google. HM Courts and Tribunals Service said its Cloud Video Platform, used for some remote hearings, was affected, and Downing Street said the government was aware and in contact with the company.

Google said the power event itself was mitigated around midday UK time and that most workloads recovered soon after, though a very small number of customers were still affected when it closed the incident, and it has promised a full analysis. This is not the first power-related failure in the region: in August 2024 a London point of presence lost both primary and backup power after a substation switchgear failure. No outlet reported a measurable move in Alphabet shares tied to the outage.

The bigger story is concentration risk. Commentary such as Simply Wall St's framed the incident as cutting across the bull case for Google Cloud's AI-driven growth, since reliability matters most for the critical workloads it is chasing. What to watch: Google's post-incident report, any statement from UK regulators (none had commented in the coverage reviewed), and whether affected banks shift toward multi-region or multi-cloud setups, which would favor redundancy spending over single-provider concentration.

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