Google says power event disrupted UK cloud services, with most restored

Google said a power event in its Europe-west2 cloud region caused errors and intermittent network failures, disrupting businesses in the UK, including banks and courts. The company said most services had been restored by 3pm, although a very small number of customers were still affected.

The Denbighshire Free Press reported that Google attributed the outage to the power event and said the company planned to investigate. The disruption affected services used by Revolut customers. Revolut said card payments, transfers, cash withdrawals and account sign-ins were unavailable or partly unavailable.

More than 1,500 people reported problems with Revolut to Downdetector on Tuesday, according to the Denbighshire Free Press; that figure counts reports to the monitoring platform, not a confirmed total of affected customers. The Denbighshire Free Press also reported that hundreds of Lloyds Bank and HSBC users logged issues with Downdetector on Tuesday morning.

The outlet said other businesses relying on Google Cloud, including banks and courts, experienced problems. Its account did not identify specific court services beyond that description. Google described the cause as a “power event” in the Europe-west2 region and said it would publish an analysis after completing an internal investigation.

The Denbighshire Free Press described the region as believed to be London. Google’s stated next step is to complete that inquiry and release its findings. The outage affected other services named by the Denbighshire Free Press, including Royal Mail, DPD and Rightmove, whose users also reported issues on Tuesday morning.

The account did not establish how many users of those services were affected or whether each disruption was caused by the same cloud-service failures. By Tuesday afternoon, the Denbighshire Free Press reported, a company told customers on X that “Emma is up and running again” following the morning’s Google Cloud power outage in London and thanked them for their patience.

The outlet did not identify the company in the quoted passage. Google said service restoration was largely complete by 3pm, with only a very small number of customers still experiencing effects.