A power failure at a Google Cloud data center near London disrupted banking and online services across the UK on Tuesday. Major banks, including Lloyds and HSBC, reported problems for customers, while digital bank Revolut also faced interruptions to several services.
Google said the problem started at 0608 GMT. By 1210 GMT, about six hours later, the company reported that most affected services were beginning to return to normal.
Google attributed the outage to a power-related incident at its London facility, known as europe-west2. In a service update, the company said, "We are seeing the recovery of services for most workloads in europe-west2". Revolut customers faced problems with ATM withdrawals, bank transfers and bank card top-ups. A source close to the matter linked these disruptions to the Google Cloud outage.
Lloyds confirmed that some customers experienced difficulties accessing its services. The bank said, "We understand the root issues have been resolved, so we expect all our services to be back to normal soon".
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HSBC also said some customers had trouble accessing its services. The bank said it would "monitor the situation, which is also affecting other organizations". Revolut apologised to customers affected by the outage and said it was working to fix the problem. The company also assured users, saying, "We can confirm that all our customers' money and data are safe".
The impact extended beyond banking. Downdetector recorded hundreds of reports of problems affecting UK businesses, including property website Rightmove, delivery company DPD and the Royal Mail postal service. Google said it would release a detailed report on the incident in the coming days.
The outage has raised fresh concerns about how much businesses depend on a few major cloud service providers. These companies offer computing power and data storage, allowing businesses to use these services without building and running their own large data centers.
Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Surrey, said Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services were the only three major cloud providers with enough infrastructure to handle the needs of large businesses across the UK.
He warned that problems at one data center could disrupt many businesses if they depend on the same cloud providers. Woodward said the risk was ‘intensifying with the AI boom' as the growing need for computing power pushes more businesses to rely on these companies. Last year, an Amazon Web Services outage also disrupted online gaming, business and transport services for several hours.