Google Cloud services recover after London data centre power outage disrupts Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC

Google said the incident began at 0608 GMT and was caused by a power-related event at its cloud infrastructure. By 1210 GMT, most services had returned to normal, around six hours after the disruption began.

A power outage at a Google Cloud data centre near London disrupted services at several UK banks on Tuesday, affecting customers of Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC, as well as businesses including property website Rightmove and delivery services.

Google said the incident began at 0608 GMT and was caused by a power-related event at its cloud infrastructure. By 1210 GMT, most services had returned to normal, around six hours after the disruption began.

In a service update, the US technology giant said it was seeing the recovery of most workloads in europe-west2, the Google Cloud region serving London.

Google said it would publish a detailed incident report in the coming days.

Google Cloud outage: Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC affected

The disruption affected multiple banking services, including ATM withdrawals, bank transfers and card top-ups for digital bank Revolut.

A Revolut spokesperson said the bank had been working to resolve the issue since it was identified and apologised to customers for the inconvenience.

"We can confirm that all our customers' money and data are safe," the spokesperson said.

UK lender Lloyds also confirmed that customers had experienced difficulties accessing its services. In a statement on Tuesday afternoon, the bank said it expected services to return to normal following the resolution of the underlying issues.

"We understand the root issues have been resolved, so we expect all our services to be back to normal soon," Lloyds said.

HSBC reported similar problems, saying customers had experienced difficulties accessing its services. The bank added that it would continue to monitor the situation, which was also affecting other organisations.

Rightmove, DPD and Royal Mail report disruptions

The impact extended beyond banking. Internet service tracker Downdetector recorded hundreds of reports of problems affecting UK businesses, including property platform Rightmove, delivery company DPD and the Royal Mail postal service.

The incident highlighted how a failure at a single cloud infrastructure provider can affect multiple organisations that rely on its services.

Cloud providers supply businesses with computing power, storage and other IT resources on demand, reducing the need for companies to invest heavily in their own server infrastructure. However, disruptions at major providers can have widespread consequences when numerous businesses depend on the same systems.

Google Cloud outage renews concerns over reliance on hyperscalers

The incident has renewed concerns about the concentration of cloud computing infrastructure among a small number of large providers, commonly known as hyperscalers.

Local providers have lost market share in recent years as global technology companies expanded their cloud operations.

According to Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Surrey, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services are the three major hyperscalers with the infrastructure needed to handle large volumes of business data at scale in the UK.

These data centres remain vulnerable to localised infrastructure failures, Woodward said, warning that such incidents can have significant knock-on effects when businesses rely on a handful of providers.

He added that the problem was intensifying amid the artificial intelligence boom, which is driving greater demand for cloud infrastructure and computing capacity.

The latest disruption follows a global outage affecting Amazon's cloud services last year, which interrupted online services used by video games, businesses and transport companies and made parts of the internet inaccessible for several hours.

As businesses increasingly shift their operations to cloud platforms and expand their use of AI, Tuesday's incident underscores the importance of infrastructure resilience and contingency planning to limit the impact of outages.