A power glitch at Google’s London data centre knocked out cloud services, leaving banks, the NHS and courts scrambling for alternatives.
On Monday morning, 2026-10-19, a sudden power event struck the europe-west2 Google Cloud zone located in a London data centre. The incident, reported at roughly 7 am UK time, immediately cascaded into a multi-service disruption that rippled through a host of consumer-facing platforms and public-sector applications across England and Wales.
Scale and timeline of the outage
Google announced on its Cloud Status page at 12:12 BST that the problem began at 23:08 PDT on Monday, a power-related outage that affected the europe-west2-b zone. The company promised a partial mitigation within the next half hour and a full restoration thereafter, with an update slated for 05:00 PDT on Tuesday, 2026-10-20.
By 8.02 am, Down Detector logged 1,458 user reports for Revolut alone, while at 9.00 am the same service showed 480 reports concerning Lloyds Bank. Percentages gathered from affected customers indicated that 36 % could not log in, 31 % were blocked from online banking, and 25 % could not use the mobile app.
Public services hit by the cloud failure
The outage struck beyond private finance. NHS England reported that its digital pathways were intermittent, and the Court Video Platform (CVP) used for remote hearings across England and Wales went dark at 10 am, as noted by the Criminal Bar Association (CBA). The CBA warned that “many of us today, both as prosecution and defence counsel, cannot proceed with trials and other hearings; our work to clear backlogs is hampered.” HM Courts and Tribunals Service echoed the issue on X, confirming that remote hearing links were unavailable. Even the high-profile Russell Brand trial continued, with Mr Justice Bennathan ordering in-court attendance for participants who could not join remotely.
Banking apps and consumer disruption
Major financial institutions relying on Google Cloud felt the impact. Users of HalifaxLloyds BankHSBCRevolutNatWest and Royal Mail reported login failures, transaction delays, and total app black-outs. Revolut’s status page reassured customers that “all money and data are safe,” while Halifax posted an apology for app difficulties. The budgeting app Emma clarified that the outage was technical, not a security breach, and remained offline. Social media complaints ranged from missed breakfast purchases to fuel-pump stand-stills, underscoring how deeply intertwined everyday payments have become with cloud infrastructure.
Google’s mitigation actions and industry reaction
Google’s engineers cited a “power event” as the root cause, stating that the incident had been mitigated and that work was ongoing to restore “existing workloads.” By 12:01 pm UK time, the company indicated a tentative full recovery by 2 pm, later adjusting the target to 6 am PDT (2 pm UK). The Prime Minister’s office confirmed it was in contact with Google to accelerate restoration. Industry experts, such as NordVPN CTO Marijus Briedis, warned that such incidents expose the fragility of “invisible” cloud dependencies, noting that “when a cloud outage leaves people unable to make payments or access everyday services, it exposes how much we depend on infrastructure we never see.”
What the episode reveals about cloud reliance
The incident adds to a recent string of high-profile cloud disruptions, including last year’s Azure and AWS outages that temporarily crippled large swaths of the internet. With hyperscalers like Google, Amazon and Microsoft hosting more than 60 % of global cloud workloads, a single power failure can ripple through banking, healthcare and the justice system in seconds. Analysts argue that critical sectors must develop “multi-cloud” or “on-premise” fallback strategies to avoid total reliance on a single provider.
