A significant outage within Google’s UK-based cloud infrastructure caused widespread disruption on Tuesday, paralyzing court systems and preventing millions of customers from accessing financial services. The tech giant attributed the failure to a “power event” at its London data center, which specifically impacted its “europe-west2-b zone.” The Financial Conduct Authority, confirmed it was in touch with Google and seeking more information about the outage, the City regulator.
The disruption heavily affected the digital systems used by courts across England and Wales.
The video link platform essential for defendants, lawyers, and other participants to attend hearings remotely failed to function throughout the morning.
This technical breakdown led to delays for multiple court cases, particularly impacting defendants who are in custody and rely on remote access to appear before judges.
Major financial institutions, including HSBC, Lloyds, and the digital banking firm Revolut, confirmed that their customers experienced difficulties with online accounts, card payments, and cash transfers. According to halifax, owned by Lloyds Bank,, On X that some of its customers had been unable to log in via the app and online.
While Lloyds noted that the root issues were resolved by the afternoon, Revolut reported that many of its services—ranging from sign-ins to ATM withdrawals and cryptocurrency trading—remained affected well into the evening, with only a small fraction of its 27 internal services fully operational by 5pm. According to by 5pm most Revolut services were still marked on its website as having problems, with only six out of 27 services listed, including support chat and internal transfers,, To be working.
Regulatory and Corporate Response
- Google: Promised to release a full analysis of the incident following an internal investigation and expressed gratitude for user patience during the resolution process.
- Financial Conduct Authority (FCA): Confirmed it is actively engaging with Google and the impacted financial institutions to assess the full scale of the disruption.
- Treasury Committee: Chair Meg Hillier has formally requested that regulators provide a detailed account of their response and an impact assessment by 4 November.
- Banking Assurance: Both Revolut and HSBC emphasized that despite the service disruptions, all customer money and sensitive data remained secure.
This event serves as the first major test for the FCA and the Bank of England since they were granted new powers to regulate cloud providers supplying critical infrastructure to the UK financial sector.
The disruption extended beyond banking and law, with reports indicating that other organizations, including the property portal Rightmove, the satire site NewsThump, and logistics firms Royal Mail and DPD, also encountered connectivity issues.
Services began to recover around 1pm, with the majority of users regaining access by 3pm. The FCA has underscored that it expects financial firms to prioritize quick fixes and maintain transparent communication with customers to ensure they are not left at a financial disadvantage during such incidents.
Key Job Details
- Google said: “We will publish an analysis of this incident once we have completed our internal investigation. We thank you for your patience while we’re working on resolving the issue.”.
- “People need to be able to access their money and make payments, so we expect firms to fix issues quickly, keep their customers informed and ensure no one is left out of pocket.”.
