Google Cloud Outage in London Disrupts UK Banks and Public Services

what happened

According to the Wall Street Journal, Google said services in its London region, europe-west2, were largely recovering after an outage caused by a power event. The disruption began early on Tuesday GMT and hit several UK banks, including HSBC, Revolut and Lloyds.

Revolut reported that card payments, transfers, ATM withdrawals and stock trading were unavailable, and said customers' money and data were safe. Lloyds said customers could log into its app, but some online services had problems. Royal Mail said its letter and parcel deliveries continued as normal.

According to gurufocus.com, ING Germany, Halifax, Rightmove, DPD and NHS England were also affected.

why it matters

For Alphabet investors, the financial cost of a single interruption is likely modest. The bigger risk is that repeated outages could lead to tougher resilience rules, higher compliance costs or customers spreading their workloads across several cloud providers. UK regulators named Google Cloud EMEA an important third-party provider to the banking sector in July.

market impact

Alphabet: rising regulatory scrutiny and pressure to diversify away from a single cloud provider

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