By Hamza Faisal
A Google Cloud outage in its London data centre knocked banking apps, delivery services and major websites offline across the UK on Tuesday morning, with digital bank Revolut warning that most of its services had gone down worldwide.
Google confirmed that "multiple services" were experiencing elevated errors and intermittent network failures in europe-west2 — its London cloud region — starting at 06:08 GMT. The company's status page said its engineering team was investigating, but as of publication Google had identified no cause and given no definite time for full restoration.
Banks felt it first
Revolut, which serves more than 80 million customers globally including 13 million in the UK, confirmed problems with card payments, money transfers, ATM withdrawals and account access. "We are currently experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services," the company said. "We can confirm that all our customers' money and data are safe. We've been working to fix the issue since it was identified this morning and apologise to anyone affected."
Reuters reported that the Revolut disruption was linked to the Google Cloud outage, citing a person familiar with the matter. Customers of Lloyds Bank, Halifax and HSBC also reported being unable to access online banking. Lloyds said its app was not fully down but acknowledged that "some customers may be having problems with some online services this morning, alongside similar issues affecting a number of organisations."
The fallout spread well beyond banks. Downdetector logged hundreds of outage reports for Royal Mail, property website Rightmove, delivery firm DPD, retailer Screwfix, broadcaster Sky and telecoms group BT, while Germany's ING also flagged problems with its banking app. It remained unclear whether every reported disruption traced back to Google Cloud.
No workaround, no timeline
Google said there was "no workaround" for affected customers and advised them to migrate impacted workloads to another cloud region if feasible. Its product and engineering teams were "actively working to restore full availability," the company said, warning that customers may see session connection failures and delays in platform workflows. The company noted its Studio product was not impacted.
One region, a continent-wide headache
The incident is a reminder of how concentrated the modern internet has become: when one cloud region in one city stumbles, the effects ripple outward. Apps and services in other countries that rely on London-based infrastructure felt the knock-on immediately, and the outage extended into continental Europe with ING Germany's services hit.
Google promised further updates on its status page as engineers continue their investigation. For now, UK customers were advised to keep retrying — and to remember that, at least according to Revolut, the money itself is safe even when the apps are not.
By Hamza Faisal
