A major Google Cloud disruption hit financial and public-sector services across Britain Tuesday after a power event affected the company’s London cloud region.
Google said engineering teams restored full service availability following the disruption in its europe-west2 region, which operates from London and supports customers across Europe.
The disruption extended beyond Google’s direct infrastructure.
British digital bank Revolut reported interruptions involving card payments and ATM withdrawals. Users also reported problems involving Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Rightmove, DPD, NHS England and Royal Mail.
Not every reported outage was necessarily caused by Google’s infrastructure, however, because outage-monitoring services aggregate reports from users and other sources.
The incident has particular significance for financial regulators.
Britain placed Google Cloud, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Oracle under direct oversight as critical third-party suppliers to the financial sector in July because disruption at a major provider could affect multiple financial institutions simultaneously.
European regulators have similarly designated Google Cloud and other major providers as critical technology suppliers to financial companies.
Tuesday’s failure therefore represents more than an isolated technology outage.
It demonstrates the operational concentration created when banks, government services and major businesses depend on a relatively small group of hyperscale cloud providers.
The immediate outage has been resolved. The longer-term question is whether regulators respond by demanding greater redundancy, stronger failover capabilities or additional resilience measures from institutions relying on critical cloud infrastructure.
