Power outage hits Google Cloud services, disrupting UK banks

A power outage at a Google Cloud data centre near London caused serious failures to services on Tuesday, the US technology giant said, as several UK banks reported widespread disruptions.

Google said in a service update that its Cloud services suffered an outage “due to a power event”, adding that a full recovery was expected at around 1300 GMT on Tuesday.

Services for the digital bank Revolut, including withdrawals from ATMs, bank transfers and bank card top-ups, were disrupted, which a source close to the matter attributed to the Google Cloud failures.

UK lenders Lloyds and HSBC also confirmed customers were facing issues with their banking services.

Google said the incident began at 0608 GMT on Tuesday.

“Multiple Google Cloud services are experiencing elevated errors and intermittent network failures in europe-west2 region,” Google said in an earlier update, referring to its London data centre.

Internet service tracker Downdetector indicated that hundreds of reports had been made of problems affecting other businesses, including the property website Rightmove and the Royal Mail postal service.

Lloyds said it was aware “some customers are having issues with our app and online banking”.

HSBC confirmed that customers were experiencing “difficulties accessing our services” and said that it would “monitor the situation, which is also affecting other organisations”.

A Revolut spokesperson said the bank was “working to fix the issue since it was identified” and offered its apologies “to anyone affected and for any inconvenience caused”.

“We can confirm that all our customers’ money and data are safe,” the spokesperson added in a statement.

AFP