Google Cloud outage disrupts UK banks, Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC affected

A power outage at a Google Cloud data centre near London disrupted banking and other online services across the UK on Tuesday, affecting customers of Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC.

Google said most services had returned to normal by 1210 GMT, around six hours after the incident began at 0608 GMT. The company attributed the disruption to a power-related incident at its London facility, part of its europe-west2 region.

The outage disrupted several Revolut services, including ATM withdrawals, bank transfers and card top-ups. A source close to the matter attributed the problems to the Google Cloud failure.

Lloyds and HSBC also confirmed that customers had experienced difficulties accessing their banking services. Lloyds said the underlying issues had been resolved and expected its services to return to normal soon.

HSBC said it would continue monitoring the situation, which had also affected other organisations. Revolut apologised to customers for the inconvenience and confirmed that their money and data remained safe.

According to internet outage tracker Downdetector, hundreds of reports also flagged problems affecting UK businesses, including property website Rightmove, delivery company DPD and the Royal Mail postal service.

Google said it would publish a detailed report on the incident in the coming days.

Outage highlights reliance on cloud providers

The incident has renewed concerns about businesses' growing dependence on a small number of major cloud providers, which supply computing and data storage services without requiring companies to build and maintain their own large server facilities.

Local providers have lost market share to global technology companies known as hyperscalers. Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services are among the major providers supporting large-scale business operations in the UK.

According to AFP, Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Surrey, said local infrastructure failures at these data centres could have widespread consequences because so many businesses rely on a handful of providers.

He added that the rapid growth of artificial intelligence was increasing demand for cloud services and deepening this dependence.

A similar disruption occurred last year when an outage affecting Amazon's cloud services interrupted online gaming, business and transport services, leaving parts of the internet inaccessible for several hours.