An outage at Google’s cloud services in the UK has caused widespread disruption, hitting courts and leaving millions of customers unable to access or send cash at banks including Lloyds, HSBC and Revolut.
Google blamed a “power event” for the failure at its London-based Cloud computing operations on Tuesday, which affected its “europe-west2-b zone”.
The US tech company said services were starting to come back online as of 1pm London time, and were back online for most customers by 3pm, but not before critical financial transactions and legal proceedings were disrupted.
That included the video system used by defendants, lawyers and other parties to attend court hearings remotely across England and Wales, which failed to work throughout the morning.
The issue was believed to have delayed several hearings, as the system is often used for defendants who are in custody but need to attend court.
Meanwhile, bank customers at high street lenders and leading digital bank Revolut were left in limbo as services including card payments, cash withdrawals and transfers were disrupted.
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, said to be working.
The City regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, confirmed it was in touch with Google and seeking more information about the outage. The Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority is also understood to be speaking with the tech firm.
Halifax, owned by Lloyds Bank, said on X that some of its customers had been unable to log in via the app and online.
Revolut said its app was down because of a “service disruption” affecting several services, but insisted that customers’ funds and data were safe. The outage was affecting new and current customers, hitting its sign-up, sign-in, card payment, transfer, ATM withdrawal and cryptocurrency services.
In a statement, Revolut said: “We are currently experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services. We can confirm that all our customers’ money and data are safe. We’ve been working to fix the issue since it was identified this morning and apologise to anyone affected and for any inconvenience caused.”
A spokesperson for Lloyds originally said that customers were having issues with “certain online services” on Tuesday morning but that they were aware of “similar issues affecting other organisations”. By the afternoon, the banking group issued an update saying: “We understand the root issues have been resolved, so we expect to [have] all our services back to normal soon.”
HSBC customers had also been complaining online that they were struggling to access their accounts. A spokesperson for the bank said: “Our services have returned to normal following earlier access issues. We continue to monitor the situation closely and thank customers for their patience.”
This outage will be the first major test for the FCA and the Bank of England since the City watchdogs were handed powers to regulate Google and other rival services that have been supplying “critical” cloud services to UK financial firms this summer.
Their response is already facing scrutiny by the influential Treasury committee of MPs, whose chair Meg Hillier wrote to the regulators asking for details about how they reacted and a sense of the total impact on the UK financial system. Hillier has asked for an initial response by 4 November.
The property portal Rightmove was also reportedly affected by the Google cloud outage, and NewsThump, the satire and spoof news website, was struggling to load. Reports suggested Royal Mail and DPD had also suffered disruption.
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.”
An FCA spokesperson said: “We are aware of the incident affecting services provided by Google and are engaging with them and affected firms to understand the impact.
“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.”
