Google Cloud has confirmed the resolution of a major technical disruption at its London data centre, known as “europe-west2,” which caused significant service outages across the UK on Tuesday. The issue, identified by the tech giant as a “power event” within a specific data centre zone, led to intermittent network failures and elevated error rates, affecting a wide array of online platforms. The tech giant apologised to those affected and thanked customers for their patience. With customers reporting problems ranging from being unable to access funds abroad to struggling to complete a property purchase, banks appeared to be among the most badly affected.
Banking services faced some of the most visible impacts, with users of Revolut, Lloyds Bank, Halifax, and Bank of Scotland reporting difficulties.
Revolut customers experienced trouble accessing funds, completing transactions, and viewing account information.
A spokesperson for Revolut confirmed that while services were temporarily disrupted, customer data and money remained secure throughout the incident, and operations were fully restored by Tuesday evening.
A Lloyds Banking Group spokesperson noted that while they did not specify the cause of the issues affecting their online services, they confirmed the underlying problems were resolved and expected a return to normal functionality. The HM Courts and Tribunals Service also reported that the outage impacted the video platform utilized for conducting remote legal hearings. According to she, The outage also meant she could not view a transaction from a relative and was told by the app’s help bot that there were no pending incoming transactions. According to more than 1,500, Of issues affecting Revolut services were flagged to platform outage monitor shortly after 08:00 BST on Tuesday.
The impact extended beyond the financial sector, affecting various digital services including Royal Mail, DPD, and the e-bike sharing platform Forest. Thousands of user reports highlighted the scale of the disruption, which began early Tuesday morning. Google Cloud issued an apology for the inconvenience and promised to publish a detailed analysis of the incident on its service health dashboard.
For small business owners, the outage proved particularly challenging.
Guy Baybutt, representing The Veg Box Company, reported that the firm was unable to access its website to process customer orders or book parcels through DPD systems. He highlighted the significant financial consequences for smaller enterprises that lack the resources to absorb lost revenue when faced with unexpected technical failures outside of their control. According to rachael Ellen, 25, a Revolut customer from Glasgow,, She was left unable to access her money. Today I was unable to pay for my parking at a shopping centre because my Revolut account wasn’t working properly,” she told. This left me in a difficult situation as I had no way to access the money I needed at the time. It’s frustrating not knowing where the payment is or when I’ll receive it,” Rachael added. Customers were unable to access our website to place new orders, meaning we lost valuable sales during the outage, to make matters worse. According to he, Such disruptions can have “serious financial consequences” for small businesses like his own. Particularly when we’re dealing with fresh, perishable produce that needs to reach customers promptly,” Baybutt added, we don’t have the resources of larger companies to simply absorb lost revenue.
This incident follows exactly one year after a major outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) disrupted over 1,000 websites across the UK. The recurrence of such events has prompted renewed discussion among experts regarding the concentrated reliance on a limited number of cloud providers to sustain modern economic infrastructure.
Professor Feng Li, associate dean for research and innovation at Bayes Business School, emphasized that the outage serves as a stark reminder of how deeply the global economy depends on a handful of large cloud operators. Experts say this latest outage show how many businesses still rely on core services provided by a few large cloud operators.
He noted that while large, complex systems are prone to failures, the critical metrics are the speed of recovery and the availability of viable alternatives for impacted clients.
Google Cloud operates as one of the primary providers of infrastructure for online platforms globally, organizing its facilities into regional “regions” and smaller data centre zones. The company stated that the specific power event occurred in the “europe-west2-b” zone, and they are currently reviewing the incident to prevent future recurrences.
