Google Cloud Outage in London Knocks UK Banks Offline, Revolut Assures Customers Their Money Is Safe

What happened

A Google Cloud outage in the company's London cloud region, known as Europe-West2, disrupted banking and digital services across the United Kingdom and beyond on Tuesday, October 20, 2026, with Google confirming that 28 of its services were affected as engineers investigated what it described as elevated errors and network failures. The disruption began around 6 to 7 a.m. British Summer Time, and Google attributed it to a power-related event in the London region, saying the issue had been mitigated and that services were recovering in stages, with a further update promised by 8 a.m. Eastern time. Among the affected services were Cloud Run, Google Cloud Storage, Google Kubernetes Engine and BigQuery Data Transfer; the failure struck a local availability zone designed to protect against hardware failures, and the cascading effects hit non-high-availability services and caused DNS connectivity problems. The Washington Times reported that British banks were among the most visible casualties of the disruption.

The banking impact was immediate and widely felt. Revolut, the British digital bank, told customers: "We are currently experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services. We can confirm that all our customers' money and data are safe." Its status page showed card payments, transfers, ATM withdrawals and account sign-ins listed as unavailable or only partially operational. Halifax acknowledged difficulties affecting some customers' app and online services, while Lloyds Banking Group said its app was operating normally but that some customers had experienced problems with certain online services. Downdetector also recorded user reports involving HSBC, Bank of Scotland, ING Germany, Royal Mail, DPD, Rightmove and Screwfix, showing the reach of the outage stretched well beyond retail banking. International Business Times noted that Revolut moved quickly to reassure customers about the safety of funds and data even as core functions remained down.

The disruption also reached into the justice system. The Cloud Video Platform used for court hearings in England and Wales was affected, limiting remote participation in proceedings during the outage window. That detail underlines how deeply public services, not just private firms, now depend on a small number of cloud infrastructure providers.

Why it matters

The incident is the latest in a string of high-profile cloud failures, following recent disruptions at Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare, and it sharpens the debate over concentration risk in digital infrastructure. When a single availability zone in one cloud region suffers a power-related event, the consequences cascade across banks, retailers, logistics firms and courts, because so much of the modern economy runs on a handful of hyperscale providers. For financial services specifically, the outage is a live test of operational resilience: Revolut's card payments, transfers and ATM withdrawals were unavailable or degraded, and high-street names like Halifax and Lloyds saw customer-facing services stumble even where core apps stayed up. The episode lands amid a regulatory push on third-party risk in banking: UK regulators have in recent years required firms to demonstrate they can keep serving customers when a third-party technology provider fails, and an outage that touches multiple lenders at once is precisely the scenario those operational-resilience rules are written for. The fact that a zone designed to protect against hardware failures produced cascading effects for services that were not configured for high availability is also a reminder that resilience choices made by individual customers of the cloud, not just the provider, shape who stays online.

How it is being covered

According to figures from ground.news, 398 sources are carrying the story, with a political split of 27 percent left, 44 percent center and 29 percent right, and no blindspot detected across the spectrum. Of the 148 sources rated for factuality, 120 sit in the high or very high categories, indicating that coverage is concentrated among reliable outlets. The story has drawn broad, largely uniform treatment across the political spectrum, with outlets on all sides carrying the bank outage and Revolut's reassurance to customers.

What to watch

Three threads merit attention as the story develops. First, Google's promised update by 8 a.m. Eastern time, which should clarify the root cause of the power-related event and the full timeline of recovery across the 28 affected services. Second, whether the affected banks, particularly Revolut, Halifax and Lloyds, publish their own post-incident statements explaining how long customers were affected and whether any transactions were delayed or lost in transit. Third, the regulatory response: an outage that simultaneously disrupted multiple UK lenders and even court hearings in England and Wales is likely to feed into ongoing scrutiny of third-party cloud dependency in financial services, and any comment from UK authorities on operational resilience would be a significant next step. Watch also for whether Google discloses which customer workloads were affected by the DNS connectivity problems, since that detail will matter to firms assessing their own exposure.

By the numbers

Source snapshot