A Google Cloud network failure in London has disrupted services at several major UK businesses, including digital bank Revolut, lenders Lloyds Bank and HSBC, and postal operator Royal Mail.
The outage began at 6:08am GMT on Tuesday in Google's europe-west2 region, which covers London, according to the technology company's service status page.
Google reported elevated error rates and intermittent network failures, adding that its engineering team was investigating the incident. The company had not disclosed the cause or provided a timeline for restoring normal services as of the latest reports.
Other businesses whose customers reported problems on outage-tracking platform Downdetector included property website Rightmove, delivery firm DPD, telecommunications company BT, Cloudflare and retailer Screwfix.
Revolut confirmed that multiple services had been affected and apologised to customers for the disruption. The digital bank, however, assured users that their money and personal data remained safe.
Technology publication The Register reported that the fault originated in one of the London region's three availability zones, europe-west2-b. Google had not publicly confirmed that detail or explained the extent of the disruption.
The incident has also drawn attention to previous outages in the same region. In July 2022, a power and cooling failure in europe-west2-a disrupted Google Cloud services for 18 hours and 23 minutes. Google's subsequent report said traffic had inadvertently been rerouted away from all three availability zones.
In August 2024, a power outage affecting networking equipment in the region caused about 40 minutes of connectivity problems.
The latest incident has raised questions about the resilience of cloud infrastructure designed to maintain services when individual components fail. However, the precise cause and extent of Tuesday's disruption remained unclear.
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