A failure in Google’s cloud network disrupted banking, delivery and court services across parts of Europe on Tuesday, after what the company described as a “power event” at a London data centre.
Google said the outage hit its europe-west2 region and that the power event had since been mitigated, advising affected customers to move workloads to another zone or region. Its status pages reported no comparable problems elsewhere, but warned that services in parts of Europe could see elevated errors and intermittent network issues.
The disruption began around 07:00 British time, Hiru News reported, citing the BBC.
What went down
Thousands of customers of the online bank Revolut were affected, with card payments, transfers, cash withdrawals and account sign-in among the systems reported down or partly unavailable. Revolut said customer money and data remained entirely secure.
Other banks including Lloyds and Halifax also reported interruptions to their services.
The remote video platform used for court business in England and Wales — the Cloud Video Platform, used by lawyers, defendants and others — was knocked out, the Criminal Bar Association said, leaving hearings and other proceedings unable to proceed. Court live streams were also affected.
Delivery operators DPD and Royal Mail were hit as well. Google said engineering teams were working to resolve the fault.
A note on scope
This was a European incident. Despite headline wording that refers simply to “banking and court services”, the institutions named in the reporting — Revolut, Lloyds, Halifax, the England and Wales court video platform, Royal Mail and DPD — are British and European. Neither source reports any disruption to Sri Lankan banks, courts or government services.
Not reported
Neither filing gives the cause of the power event itself, the number of customers affected, or the time service was fully restored. Google has not published a post-incident analysis at the time of writing, and neither report says whether data was lost or whether the single-zone failure should have been absorbed by redundancy elsewhere in the region.
