Google Cloud Outage Due to London Data Center Issue Disrupted Services Across Europe
A Google Cloud data center outage in London disrupted numerous online services and applications across Europe, including the online bank Revolut. In the middle of the day on October 20, Google reported that most services had been restored, though isolated disruptions were still ongoing, writes the BBC.
Illustrative image. Photo: AP Photo/Terry Chea
Around 9 AM GMT (approximately 12:00 PM Belarusian time), Google reported numerous problems with its cloud service in the europe-west2 European region, whose data center is located in London. The first disruptions appeared approximately two and a half hours prior. The company later explained that the cause was an incident in the power supply system.
Around 3 PM London time (approximately 6 PM Belarusian time), Google stated that most systems were being restored. However, some customers might still experience outages. According to company representatives, at that point, the problems affected only a small number of users.
The outages, in particular, prevented many Revolut customers from making payments in the UK, Malta, Germany, Lithuania, and Latvia.
In the UK, for some time, online services for Lloyds Bank, its subsidiaries Halifax and Bank of Scotland, as well as HSBC, courier service DPD, and other companies either did not work or experienced disruptions. Problems also arose with the judicial system's video platform, leading to the cancellation of numerous video conference court hearings.
Disruptions in banking services also hindered the normal operation of thousands of companies using their services. In Germany, for example, ING bank customers reported problems logging into their mobile app.
According to DownDetector, on Tuesday morning, problems also occurred for DHL customers in Germany and Booking.com users in Italy and Spain. In the Netherlands, the tax service website experienced disruptions.
In response to user complaints on the social network X, Revolut stated that it was aware of the problem affecting the app's operation and that its technical team was trying to resolve it as quickly as possible. The bank did not specify what exactly caused the disruptions.
The company later assured that customer finances and personal data were safe. This autumn, Revolut had already faced data breaches twice.
Outages in major cloud service providers often cause problems for various internet services that depend on their infrastructure.
In October 2025, a major outage occurred at Amazon Web Services. Due to DNS resolution issues in the US-EAST-1 region, where servers are located on the east coast of the USA, over a thousand websites and applications became inaccessible, including Slack, Zoom, Roblox, and Bank of Scotland.
A major outage also occurred at the Google europe-west2 data center in July 2022. At that time, the company explained the disruptions were due to a cooling system failure for powerful computers. The UK was experiencing record heat at that time. Now, however, London and its surroundings are experiencing typical autumn weather.
Joe Tidy, the BBC's technology correspondent, noted that this incident once again highlights the dependence of digital services on the physical infrastructure they run on.
In the first half of October, large-scale disruptions to online services of numerous companies and institutions also occurred in Russia. These were caused by Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex company data centers.