Google Restores Cloud Services After London Power Event Disrupts Banks and Courts
A power event in Google's London cloud region disrupted services at Revolut, banks and court video streams before being mitigated, with Google apologising for the outage.
Google has said a power event that disrupted its Cloud services in the London region has been mitigated, after the incident caused widespread problems for banks, the fintech firm Revolut and court video streams. The company apologised for the disruption, which affected customers relying on its cloud infrastructure in the UK capital.
Revolut, which has millions of customers in the UK, was among the firms flagging issues affecting multiple services as the outage unfolded. Banks also reported problems, while live streams from courts were down, according to reports of the disruption. The incident centred on Google Cloud's London region, a key piece of infrastructure for organisations that run their systems on the company's servers rather than their own hardware.
Google confirmed the cause as a power event and said the situation had been brought under control. The company's apology followed criticism from affected users, though the full scale of the disruption across different sectors was not immediately clear. The outage highlights how dependent financial institutions and public services have become on a small number of large cloud providers, meaning a single failure in one data centre region can ripple out to consumer banking apps and the justice system at the same time.
For Revolut, the disruption meant customers faced problems across several of its services, a significant issue given the fintech's large UK user base. Banks affected by the incident would similarly have faced pressure to keep customers informed while their systems were impaired. Court video streams going down raised separate concerns about access to remote hearings, although it was not immediately known how many proceedings were affected or whether they were delayed.
The timing of the outage placed additional scrutiny on the resilience of digital infrastructure used by regulated financial firms. UK banks and payment companies are expected to maintain high availability of their services, and outages that trace back to a third-party cloud provider can complicate efforts to restore systems quickly because the fault lies outside the firm's own control.
Google's London cloud region is one of several the company operates globally, and outages in individual regions have occurred before. The company's response in this case focused on identifying the power event and mitigating its effects, after which it issued an apology. It did not immediately provide a detailed account of how many customers were affected or how long services were degraded.
The incident serves as a reminder of the concentration risk in modern digital infrastructure, where banks, fintechs and public bodies may all depend on the same underlying platforms. When one of those platforms falters, the consequences can appear simultaneously in consumer finance and in the operation of courts, two areas where reliability is essential and public tolerance for disruption is low.
Google said the power event had been mitigated, indicating that normal service was being restored. Customers of the affected firms were left to wait for their services to return to normal, while the companies involved assessed the impact of an outage that briefly linked a data centre power failure to the everyday business of banking and the administration of justice.
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