Google Cloud London outage: 38 products hit

Google Cloud’s London region, europe-west2, began returning errors at 06:08 UTC on 20 October 2026, which was 07:08 in London. Google’s status page blames a power event in one zone, europe-west2-b, and lists 38 products as affected. Revolut and Halifax customers reported problems, and the video platform used for court hearings was down across large parts of England and Wales.

Key points

Scope: Google blames a power event in europe-west2-b. The status page lists 38 affected products, from Google Kubernetes Engine and Cloud Run to Compute Engine, BigQuery and Cloud SQL.
Recovery: Google’s latest update, at 12:44 UTC, says services are recovering for most workloads in europe-west2 as of 05:10 PDT. Its 11:58 update had tentatively set full recovery of existing workloads for 06:00 PDT, or 13:00 UTC, a time the latest update no longer repeats.
UK impact: Revolut reported a “service disruption affecting multiple services”, and Halifax said some customers had problems with its app and website. HSBC, in a statement the BBC relayed, said some customers were “experiencing difficulties accessing our services”, without mentioning Google Cloud.

Background

In July 2022 a wide-ranging outage hit the same europe-west2 data centers. BBC cyber correspondent Joe Tidy reported that Google blamed a cooling failure during a heatwave and shut down many machines to avoid fire or heat damage. The BBC says there is no sign that today’s outage has the same cause.

Last October, according to the BBC, an AWS outage in Amazon’s largest US data center region knocked more than 1,000 websites offline, including UK banks. The Guardian notes that today’s Google Cloud incident came exactly 12 months after that Amazon disruption.

BBC technology reporter Liv McMahon points out that europe-west2 is Google’s only UK cloud region, so a problem there reaches any UK or London business that relies on Google Cloud. The Next Web reports that Revolut runs its app and back-end systems on Google Cloud, and that the two companies extended their partnership into a multi-year deal in September 2025.

The facts

Google’s regions and zones documentation lists three zones in europe-west2: a, b and c. This event hit b.

Time (UTC)	What the status page said
06:08	Start time on record, which is 23:08 PDT on 19 October
08:35	First entry: several services show errors and intermittent network failures; still investigating; no workaround
09:24	First workaround: where feasible, move affected workloads to another zone or region. Looker Studio is not affected
11:00	Still investigating; workaround unchanged
11:12	First mention of the power event: outage in europe-west2-b; power event mitigated; partial recovery of infrastructure services expected within 30 minutes
11:58	Recovery under way, existing workloads first; customers may not yet be able to create new workloads; full recovery of existing workloads tentatively 06:00 PDT
12:44	Services recovering for most workloads as of 05:10 PDT; next update due 07:00 PDT; the 06:00 target no longer appears

Google files the event as a “service disruption”, not a full “service outage”, with severity “medium”. Its symptom text says Google Cloud services are unavailable in europe-west2-b, and that some services across the region show elevated errors and intermittent network failures.

The 38 figure counts the products Google lists as affected. It is not a count of data centers, and it does not mean all 38 are down. The Next Web reported 36 that morning. The official list we checked says 38, and we cannot tell when it grew. Google has not said what kind of power failure it was, and the status page does not mention a post-incident report.

Who has said what in the UK:

Revolut said “all our customers’ money and data are safe” and that it was working to fix the issue. The Next Web, citing Revolut’s status page, reports that most services were unavailable or partly unavailable, including card payments and cash withdrawals.
Halifax said on X that it was “aware some customers are having issues” with its app and website. It did not say whether Google Cloud caused them.
Lloyds said its app was online and customers could log in normally, but that “some are having issues with certain online services”.
Emma, a budgeting app, said it was down because of a Google Cloud outage affecting services in London, and that this was “a technical outage, not a security issue”.
DPD said it was aware of connection issues affecting its website.
The Criminal Bar Association said the Cloud Video Platform was down across large parts of England and Wales. HM Courts and Tribunals Service said it was working with technology partners to restore service, without naming Google Cloud. PA reported that the judge in the Russell Brand trial pressed on despite the broken link.
HSBC: the BBC live page relayed a statement at 13:33 BST (12:33 UTC): “We are aware that some customers are experiencing difficulties accessing our services.” It added that the situation was also affecting other organisations. The statement does not mention Google Cloud.

What others say

ESET’s Jake Moore: “Cloud services are a huge point of failure”, and businesses need to plan for when these services go down (Guardian).
Amro Al-Said Ahmad, a computer science lecturer at Keele University, says a problem in one cloud region can spread through a whole digital supply chain. “True resilience requires designing for regional failures through multi-region deployments, workload portability, and tested disaster recovery procedures,” he writes (Guardian).
Ryan Gracey, a partner at the law firm Gordons, says many businesses will find that their cloud contracts “protect the supplier far more than they protect the customer” (Guardian).
A Reddit commenter, quoted by The Register: “the classic one zone takes a nap and your non-HA service is in it.”
In a Hacker News thread, one user said their service had been down for about two hours before Google acknowledged it. Another said a database failed to start after failover. Both are single reports, not data.
The sources disagree on Revolut. The Next Web, citing Reuters, reports that a person familiar with the matter linked Revolut’s outage to the Google Cloud disruption. Revolut’s public statements do not mention Google Cloud.

Our take

This story is about scope, not just the fact that Google Cloud had an outage. According to the status page, the trouble began in one zone, yet 38 products sit under one incident and some services in the wider region still show errors. Google’s workaround is to move work to another zone or region. For a team running only in europe-west2-b, that move falls to them.

The useful post-incident questions are which zones your services run in, and whether failover has actually been tested. The Hacker News user whose database would not start after failover is a reminder that failover can fail too. Google says Looker Studio is unaffected, yet Looker (Google Cloud core) is on the list, so check the list rather than guessing from product names. Gordons’ point is worth acting on: read your SLA and credit terms now.

Google’s 20-year nuclear power purchase deal with Constellation, which we covered on 6 October, is about where the power comes from. Google has not said which part of its power chain failed here, so we do not connect the two.

Our check has limits. We did not see inside Revolut’s, Halifax’s or the courts’ systems. The lists here come from public statements, Downdetector reports and press coverage.

What to watch

To see in a minute whether you are exposed, open status.cloud.google.com/incidents.json and search for europe-west2 and the products you use.
Google’s next update is due by 07:00 PDT on 20 October (14:00 UTC, 15:00 BST).
When the incident closes, the JSON record gains an end time. When we checked at 12:49 UTC, that field was still empty and the latest update was at 12:44 UTC.
The 11:58 update said customers may not yet be able to create new workloads; the 12:44 update does not repeat that. If your deploy pipeline creates resources, wait for the next update before you do.