Google Cloud Outage Disrupts London Services, Hits Revolut

Multiple Google Cloud services experienced disruptions in the company’s London region on Tuesday, October 20, while digital bank Revolut reported problems affecting several of its services, including card payments and ATM withdrawals.

Google’s service status dashboard recorded elevated error rates and intermittent network failures in its europe-west2 region, which is based in London. The incident began at about 6:08 a.m. GMT and affected a range of cloud products used by businesses to run applications and store or process data. Google later marked the regional incident as closed after reporting a disruption lasting several hours.

Revolut’s service status page showed that most of its services were either unavailable or partially unavailable during the incident. The company said in a statement posted on X that it was experiencing a disruption affecting multiple services but assured customers that their money and data remained safe. Reuters, citing a person familiar with the matter, reported that Revolut’s outage was related to the Google Cloud disruption.

The incident was not limited to Revolut. Reports from the UK indicated that several other digital services, including banking apps and online platforms, also experienced problems. The Associated Press reported disruptions involving Lloyds, Halifax and HSBC, while other coverage identified interruptions affecting services such as Royal Mail, delivery company DPD and property website Rightmove. The extent of the impact varied by provider and service.

Google initially said its engineering teams were investigating the issue and working to restore affected services. The company’s public status dashboard documented a range of impacted products in the London region before the incident was marked closed. A detailed explanation of the cause was not included in the initial service-status notice reviewed for this report.

Cloud computing providers supply the underlying infrastructure that organisations use to operate websites, applications, databases and other digital services without having to maintain all the necessary computing systems themselves. When a regional cloud disruption occurs, customers whose services depend on that infrastructure can experience interruptions even if their own systems have not independently failed.

The incident underscores the reliance of financial services and other essential digital platforms on a relatively small number of large cloud providers. For customers, an outage can mean temporary difficulty accessing accounts or completing transactions; for businesses, it can interrupt operations and undermine confidence in the availability of online services. Although Google marked the London incident as closed, the episode illustrates how a technical problem affecting shared infrastructure can spread beyond a single provider to services that millions of people use.