Google Cloud services in London suffered significant network disruptions on Tuesday, 20 October following a power-related incident, knocking out access for thousands of users across multiple online platforms including digital bank Revolut, high street lender Halifax, and budgeting app Emma. The disruption originated in Google's Europe-west2 region and began at approximately 7 am British Summer Time (BST).

What Triggered the Outage

Google confirmed on its Cloud Status page that the disruption was linked to a power event affecting its Europe-west2-b zone in London. The company said the power incident had been mitigated and indicated that partial recovery of infrastructure services was expected within 30 minutes of the update, with restoration of remaining services to follow. Google's engineering team continued to investigate the broader disruption and apologised to affected customers.

The Europe-west2 region serves as a critical node for cloud-dependent businesses across the United Kingdom and parts of Europe, making any disruption there disproportionately impactful for UK-based digital services.

Services Affected

Revolut, the UK-based digital banking company, reported issues affecting multiple services, with thousands of customers logging problems accessing the platform. The company confirmed that customers' money and data remained safe and that it had been working to resolve the issue since it was first identified on Tuesday morning. Revolut also issued an apology to affected users.

Halifax acknowledged reports of difficulties with its mobile application and website, telling customers on social media platform X that it was aware of the problems and was actively working to restore normal services. It advised customers to contact the bank by telephone if needed. Notably, Halifax did not confirm whether its disruption was directly linked to the Google Cloud incident.

Budgeting application Emma explicitly attributed its outage to the Google Cloud disruption, stating that the issue was technical rather than security-related and that it had been monitoring the situation from 7 am. Emma said it would provide updates once its platform was operational again.

Wider Impact Tracked

Website monitoring platform Downdetector recorded a spike in user-reported problems across several websites and online services on Tuesday morning. However, it was not immediately clear whether all flagged platforms relied on Google Cloud infrastructure or whether every reported issue was directly connected to the power incident.

This comes amid growing concerns about the concentration risk inherent in cloud computing, where a single regional incident at a major provider can cascade across dozens of unrelated consumer-facing services simultaneously. London's Europe-west2 zone has previously been a point of concern for enterprise clients requiring high availability.

What Happens Next

Google said its engineering team was continuing to assess the full scope of the disruption. Affected businesses were expected to issue individual updates as services came back online. The incident is likely to renew scrutiny over cloud dependency among UK financial services firms, particularly those regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which has increasingly focused on operational resilience standards for digital banks and fintech platforms.