Google Cloud’s europe-west2 region, which is based in London, faced an outage lasting nearly eight hours on Tuesday, impacting a range of services including banks, courts and transport apps.
The issues began at around 7AM GMT on Tuesday morning, with Google Cloud reporting that the issue was resolved for “most of the customers” by around 3PM. The company said that the issue was caused by a “power event” within the europe-west2-b zone, one of three local availability zones in London.
The outage affected a wide range of Google Cloud’s services and led to downtime for websites, apps and servers that run on the technology in the region. Banks including Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC reported problems throughout the day, with the fully digital Revolut being inaccessible for at least six hours.
In comments under the bank’s post on social media platform X, users reported being unable to pay using Revolut, with some claiming they were trapped inside public transport stations as they could not tap out using their card.
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority told the BBC it was “aware of an incident affecting services provided by Google and […] engaging with them and affected firms to understand the impact”.
The video platform used by HM Courts and Tribunals Service for remote hearings was also inaccessible, with the criminal bar association reporting that prosecution and defence barristers could not “proceed with trials and other hearings” after the service went down at 10am.
Other services were affected though not completely shut down. The BBC reported that some NHS patients were unable to book appointments through its app for a short period, while delivery firm DPD’s website was inaccessible for three hours according to its posts on X.
The full extent of the outages is not yet clear, with the website DownDetector showing increased reports of issues with a range of other services including Microsoft Teams, Cloudflare and Royal Mail over the past 24 hours. These may be unrelated to the Google Cloud outage, however.
Cloudflare’s chief information officer, Sam Rhea, said in a statement that: “The incident has not caused impact to Cloudflare.” A spokesperson for the company declined to comment further on the increase in reported incidents, which lasted from around 8AM to 1PM.
This is not the first time the europe-west2 servers have gone down in recent years. In 2022, a cooling failure during a heatwave forced Google Cloud to shut down a large number of its servers in the same cluster to avoid heat damage.
