LONDON — A power fault at a Google Cloud data centre region in London disrupted dozens of online services across Britain and Europe on Tuesday morning, including digital bank Revolut and services linked to Lloyds, HSBC and Halifax, alongside companies such as Royal Mail and DPD.
Google said the problem began in its europe-west2 region, where a power issue in one zone caused errors and network interruptions across dozens of cloud services. Revolut was the hardest hit, with its app and card services suspended across Europe. Customers reported problems signing in to accounts, making card payments, transferring money, withdrawing cash from ATMs and completing cryptocurrency transactions. The company confirmed the disruption in a statement, said all customer funds and data were completely safe, and said its teams had been working on the problem since the morning. More than 1,500 problem reports about Revolut were logged on the outage-tracking site Downdetector on Tuesday morning.
Lloyds Banking Group said some of its online services were affected, although customers could still log in to its app as normal. HSBC and Halifax customers also reported difficulties, and services at Royal Mail, DPD, Rightmove and Screwfix were disrupted. A video service used by Britain’s courts was also interrupted, and customers of ING bank in Germany reported problems with its app.
On its service status page, Google said the fault began at 7:08 a.m. British time with a power problem in one zone of the region and affected 38 cloud products. The company initially offered no workaround, but later advised business customers to move their systems to another zone or region if they could. The Register reported that one of the London region’s three zones was affected, and Reuters linked the disruption to the same Google Cloud fault.
By midday, Google said the power problem had been largely resolved and most systems were recovering, but it did not say what had caused the fault or give a final time for full restoration.
Why it matters: the outage is a clear example of how heavily the world’s banks and businesses now depend on the infrastructure of a handful of large cloud companies — and how a fault at a single data centre can affect millions of customers at the same time.
