A major Google Cloud outage centred on its London region has knocked services offline across the UK, with digital bank Revolut among the worst affected.
Google reported that its europe-west2 region — listed on the company’s website as London — had been experiencing “multiple issues” since 0608 GMT on Tuesday. The tech giant said its engineering team was investigating, apologising “to all who are affected by the disruption.”
Revolut down across the board
Revolut confirmed that “multiple services” were unavailable, including card payments, transfers, ATM withdrawals, currency exchange and stock trading. More than 1,500 users reported problems on Tuesday morning via the Downdetector platform.
“We can confirm that all our customers’ money and data are safe,” a Revolut Bank spokesperson said. “We’ve been working to fix the issue since it was identified this morning and apologise to anyone affected and for any inconvenience caused.”
A person familiar with the matter told Reuters the Revolut outage was related to the Google Cloud disruption. The fintech, which has millions of UK customers, said it was flagging issues affecting sign-ins, payments and withdrawals.
Banks, mail and property hit
The disruption cascaded well beyond one bank. Lloyds said customers could log into its app normally but some online services were having issues, adding it was “aware of similar issues affecting other organisations.”
Hundreds of reports also hit Downdetector for HSBC, Royal Mail, DPD, Rightmove, BT, Cloudflare and Screwfix. Budgeting app Emma told customers it was down because of the Google Cloud outage, stressing: “This is a technical outage, not a security issue.”
In Germany, ING reported problems with online banking logins and its app due to a separate technical issue.
What’s broken in the cloud
According to Google’s service status page, the London region was suffering “elevated errors and intermittent network failures.” Affected products include BigQuery Data Transfer Service, Cloud Filestore, Cloud Run, Google App Engine, NetApp Volumes, Google Kubernetes Engine and Managed Service for Apache Kafka.
There were “no workarounds for now,” Google said, with updates promised through the morning.
The incident echoes other recent major outages — a faulty CrowdStrike software update two years ago crashed millions of Windows machines worldwide, hitting airports and the NHS, while Amazon Web Services suffered a major outage last year.
London Streets will update this story as services are restored.
