Google Cloud suffered widespread errors in its europe-west2 region — the company’s London zone — on Tuesday after what it called a power event, disrupting mobile banking, fintech apps, logistics firms and the remote-hearing system used by courts across England and Wales.
Google's status page listed more than a dozen affected products, from Cloud Storage and Kubernetes Engine to Pub/Sub and Managed Airflow, and warned of elevated errors with no immediate workaround beyond shifting workloads to another region where possible. Engineers said the power event was mitigated and that partial recovery would roll through the morning.
Banks and fintech customers locked out
Revolut customers reported service failures that a person familiar with the matter linked to the Google disruption, according to Reuters. Halifax, part of Lloyds Banking Group, confirmed that some users could not access its app or online banking, while Lloyds said its app remained online but that certain services were glitching as it monitored a wider industry issue. DownDetector charts showed spikes in outage reports for HSBC and Lloyds users as well.
Delivery and retail platforms also felt the ripple. The Register reported problems at Royal Mail, DPD, BT, Cloudflare and Screwfix, reflecting how many British firms host customer-facing tools on Google’s London footprint rather than maintaining their own data centres.
Court hearings delayed
The Press Association said the Cloud Video Platform used for criminal and civil hearings nationwide stopped working, leaving defendants, lawyers and journalists unable to join remotely. Staff at Southwark Crown Court told reporters there was a national outage with no ETA; the judge in the Russell Brand trial continued with in-person seating after the video link failed, limiting press access as a complainant began evidence.
Resilience questions
Cybersecurity advisers noted the outage arrived a year after a major Amazon Web Services disruption and revived debate about concentrating critical infrastructure in a handful of hyperscale clouds. Keele University lecturer Amro Al-Said Ahmad told reporters that regional failures propagate through "an entire digital supply chain," while ESET adviser Jake Moore said businesses must plan for inevitable cloud downtime rather than assuming migration alone delivers resilience.
Law firm partner Ryan Gracey added that many corporate contracts cap liability at fee credits, leaving boards — especially at regulated banks — to prove they can keep essential services running when a supplier goes dark. For Tuesday’s commuters and court users, the practical test was simpler: apps that refused to load and hearings that could not start until Google’s London power returned.