Google Cloud outage: Revolut suffers service disruption as bank customers report problems – business live

The Financial Conduct Authority and Bank of England are pushing Google for details of today's cloud services outage, as they face their first major test as new regulators of “critical†tech suppliers to UK banks.

Both the FCA and Bank of England were handed powers in July to start directly overseeing the local arms of Google Cloud and three other Silicon Valley rivals – Amazon Web Services, Oracle and Microsoft – after being designated as critical third parties by the UK government, as their services become a crucial part of increasingly digital banking services.

A spokesperson for the FCA said they were in touch with Google and seeking more information about the outage. The Bank of England's Prudential Regulation Authority is also understood to be speaking with the tech firm about the service outage which began this morning (details start here).

The watchdogs are in charge of ensuring that the cloud providers are resilient and actively reducing the risk of cyber-attacks and major outages like the one experienced today, which has disrupted services for millions of people and businesses across the UK.

For its part, Google is meant to prove it is carrying out proper stress testing, including how it would respond to imagined emergency scenarios that would put their operations under severe strain. They're also meant to have reported any major incidents, including this power outages, to the two regulators (though it's unclear in what time frame).

The failure of banking apps due to the Google Cloud outage could disproportionately affect those most struggling with the cost of living, argues audit, tax and business advisory firm Blick Rothenberg.

Blick Rothenberg partner Andrew Sanford explains:

“Weekly or fortnightly paid employees, often those on lower wages, may have found that they are unable to access their funds on the very day where they have payments or commitments to make.â€

“The hospitality sector will also be disproportionately impacted by those people affected by the outage with no means of making payment, who simply do not go the pub or restaurant.â€

There are signs that the companies affected by Google's outage are getting online again.

Emma, the personal finance, budgeting, and money management app which was taken down by the Google Cloud outage (see 10.11am), has posted on X that it is operating again.

Emma says:

We're back ✅ Emma is up and running again after this morning's Google Cloud power outage in London. Your data and money were safe throughout. Some balances may take a little while to refresh. Thanks for your patience 💜

Newsflash: Google says service ​are being ‌restored ‌in its London-based ‌cloud region after today's outage.

The company says:

“We are seeing the recovery of services for most workloads in europe-west2.â€

This isn't the end of the story, though – Google are promising another update by 3pm UK time.

Google added that they will provide an update by 06:00 PDT (2pm BST) with “current details†of the situation.

Newsflash: Google says the ‘power event' which affected its London-based cloud computing operating and caused widepread disruption to services in the UK has been ‘mitigated'.

In a new statement on its Service Health page, Google reports seeing signs that services are being restored.

It says:

A power event caused an outage within europe-west2-b zone. The power event is mitigated. We are seeing the recovery of services and are prioritizing the recovery of existing workloads.Customers may not be able to yet create new workloads.

Full recovery of existing workloads should be completed, tentatively by Tuesday, 2026-10-20 06:00.

[CORRECTED: 6am PST is 2pm UK time.]

The Google Cloud outage could result in some companies losing sales, and they might struggle to get much compensation, suggests Ryan Gracey, partner at law firm Gordons.

“Many businesses will be discovering today that their cloud contracts protect the supplier far more than they protect the customer.

“When a provider goes down, the usual remedy is a modest credit against future fees. That is small consolation set against lost revenue, frustrated customers and damage to reputation.

“Liability for those wider losses is typically capped or excluded altogether. The real exposure sits in the gap between how heavily a business depends on its provider and how little its contract actually guarantees. For banks, the stakes are higher still. Regulators expect them to keep essential services running even when a key supplier fails.

“Outsourcing a service does not mean outsourcing responsibility for it. Boards should be asking, not just what their contracts promise, but whether the business could keep going if its provider went dark for a day.â€

Google are blaming a ‘power event' for the disruption at its London-based Cloud computing operations today.

In an update on its status page, Google says:

Due to a power event we had suffered an outage within europe-west2-b zone. The power event is mitigated. Partial mitigation to infrastructure services will be observed within the next 30 minutes and the remaining services will be mitigated there after.

The video system used by courts across England and Wales went down on Tuesday in an issue believed to be linked to the wider Google outage, the Press Association report.

The Cloud Video Platform (CVP), which is used by defendants, lawyers and other parties to attend court hearings remotely, was not functioning throughout the morning.

Users expecting to attend court on video link were met with a message saying there was an internal server error.

The issue is expected to have left many hearings across the country delayed or unable to go ahead as the system is often used for defendants who are in custody to attend court.

The judge in the Russell Brand trial, Mr Justice Bennathan, decided to press on with proceedings at Southwark Crown Court on Tuesday morning despite the link being broken.

Some journalists who would have been watching online were squeezed into extra seats in court, but many were not able to follow the proceedings as the fourth complainant started her evidence.

Staff at the court said there was a national outage and did not know when it would be resolved.

It is understood to be linked to an outage affecting Google's Cloud network, which affected businesses including online bank Revolut, delivery service DPD and Royal Mail.

The nature of cloud ecosystems mean that a problem in one region can ripple out and cause widesread disruption.

Dr Amro Al-Said Ahmad, lecturer in computer science at Keele University, explains:

“Another outage, another reminder of the fragility of cloud infrastructure. Google Cloud is currently experiencing a major incident affecting the europe-west2 (London) region, with elevated errors and intermittent network failures impacting more than 38 cloud-native services across key categories including Compute & Containers, Storage & Databases, Analytics & Data Processing, Networking & Connectivity, Messaging & Streaming, Caching & Memory Services, and AI/Platform Services.

“Google Engineers are actively investigating the issue and testing mitigations, including moving impacted workloads to alternative regions where feasible. The disruption has also affected several major organisations and financial institutions that rely on the affected region.

“More importantly, the incident highlights the dependency effect of modern cloud ecosystems. When a core cloud region experiences failures, the impact extends far beyond the directly affected services. Applications, APIs, databases, authentication systems, payment platforms, analytics pipelines, and third-party SaaS products that depend on those services can all experience cascading failures.

“A problem in a single cloud region can therefore propagate through an entire digital supply chain, affecting organisations that are several layers removed from the original outage. While this is a regional outage centred on europe-west2, the breadth of affected services highlights a key cloud engineering lesson: resilience is not achieved by simply moving to the cloud. True resilience requires designing for regional failures through multi-region deployments, workload portability, and tested disaster recovery procedures.â€

A Lloyds spokesperson has confirmed the bank (which includes Halifax) has experienced problems today:

“Our app is online and customers can log in normally, though we understand some are having issues with certain online services this morning. We are aware of similar issues affecting other organisations and are monitoring the situation closely.â€

Google's latest update on its Cloud outage reiterates what we knew already.

It says:

We apologize to all who are affected by the disruption.

Symptoms

Multiple Google Cloud services are experiencing elevated errors and intermittent network failures in europe-west2 region.

Note: Looker Studio is not impacted by this outage.

Workaround

If feasible, the impacted customer may try to migrate their workload impacted to another available location (zone or region).