Google Cloud outage disrupts banking and online services across Europe
A major disruption affecting Google Cloud's infrastructure in Western Europe has caused widespread service interruptions, leaving users unable to access several banking platforms and online applications, including Revolut and Halifax.
The outage, reported on Tuesday, October 20, primarily affected Google's London-based europe-west2 cloud region, where multiple services experienced increased error rates and intermittent network failures.
According to Google's official service status dashboard, the technical problems affected numerous cloud products used by businesses to operate websites, applications, databases and digital infrastructure.
Among the affected services were Google Cloud Storage, Cloud Run, Google App Engine, BigQuery Data Transfer Service, Google Kubernetes Engine, Compute Engine, Cloud Filestore, Pub/Sub, Persistent Disk and Storage Transfer Service.
Other impacted products included Cloud Dataflow, Cloud NetApp Volumes, Looker, Cloud Composer and Managed Service for Apache Kafka.
The disruption also affected financial technology companies and major banking services that rely on cloud infrastructure.
Customers of UK-based digital banking platform Revolut reported difficulties accessing their accounts, making card payments and withdrawing money from ATMs.
Revolut acknowledged that several of its features were experiencing technical problems and said its teams were working to restore normal operations. The company assured customers that their money and personal data remained secure.
Similar issues were reported by customers of Halifax, part of Lloyds Banking Group, while other financial institutions, including Lloyds Bank and HSBC, experienced service interruptions.
Reports also indicated problems affecting other businesses and public services, highlighting the widespread impact of the outage on organizations dependent on cloud computing.
Google Cloud confirmed that its engineers were investigating the disruption in the europe-west2 region and working to identify the cause and restore affected services.
The company initially reported elevated errors and intermittent network failures but did not immediately provide a detailed explanation of what caused the incident.
The outage demonstrates the growing dependence of banking institutions, technology companies and public services on major cloud infrastructure providers.
Even localized failures in large cloud computing networks can disrupt critical digital services across multiple industries and countries.
At the time of the latest Google Cloud status update reviewed, the incident remained listed as active, with no confirmed time for full restoration.
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