Google Cloud Outage: On Tuesday 20 October, a power failure at a single Google Cloud facility in London froze Revolut cards at supermarket tills and disrupted banking, parcel delivery, property search and even court hearings across the UK. MPs now want answers. Here is what happened in the Google Cloud outage and what every UK organisation running on the cloud should learn from it.

What happened

The Google Cloud outage began just after 07:00 BST on 20 October 2026, when a power event hit europe-west2-b, one of three availability zones in Google Cloud’s London region. Google said the disruption occurred at a third-party facility serving the region. Its incident record ran for seven hours and 52 minutes before the incident was closed at around 15:00 BST.

The knock-on effects of the Google Cloud outage were wide-ranging. Revolut reported disruption to card payments, ATM withdrawals and transfers, while Lloyds and HSBC customers reported problems with online services. Royal Mail, DPD, Rightmove, Screwfix and NHS England were also affected, as was the video platform used for remote court hearings in England and Wales. Revolut said its customers’ money and data remained safe throughout.

For much of the morning, Google’s only suggested workaround was for affected customers to move their workloads to another available location, if feasible. For businesses that had never planned for that, it was not a realistic option at 08:00 on a Tuesday.

Why regulators are paying close attention to the Google Cloud outage

Timing made the Google Cloud outage a political story as well as a technical one. On 10 July 2026, HM Treasury designated the UK or EMEA arms of Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Oracle as Critical Third Parties to the financial sector. Joint oversight by the Bank of England, the PRA and the FCA began on 13 July. Under the regime, designated providers must report serious outages to the FCA and the Bank of England.

Within hours of the Google Cloud outage, Treasury Committee chair Meg Hillier MP wrote to the Governor of the Bank of England and the Chief Executive of the FCA, asking how they would respond, how large the disruption was and what financial harm had been caused. The European Banking Authority also contacted Google to assess the impact on EU financial firms.

The European Banking Authority made a point that applies to every regulated business in the UK too: designating a provider as critical does not transfer responsibility for managing incidents away from the firms that use it. Oversight of the hyperscalers is growing, but accountability for your customers stays with you.

5 lessons from the Google Cloud outage for UK businesses

1. An availability zone is not a backup plan

Cloud regions are split into zones so that a failure in one building does not take down the rest. In practice, many applications depend on regional services, shared networking or a single zone without anyone realising. When europe-west2-b lost power, errors spread across the wider London region. If your critical services cannot fail over to a different region, you are more exposed than your architecture diagram suggests.

2. Concentration risk is shared, even when your suppliers are different

Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC are separate businesses with separate technology teams, yet their customers felt the same failure on the same morning. The same is true further down the supply chain. Your payment provider, your courier, your CRM and your bank may all rely on the same handful of data centres. Map those dependencies, not just your own.

3. Know your impact tolerances, and test them

UK financial firms are already required to set impact tolerances for their important business services, meaning the maximum disruption they can withstand before customers suffer intolerable harm. Every business can borrow that discipline. Decide how long each critical service can be down, then test whether your current setup can actually meet that limit during a regional cloud failure.

4. Do not rely on your provider’s status page

During major incidents, status dashboards often lag behind what customers are actually experiencing. Independent monitoring, centralised logging and alerting across every environment you run tell you what is really happening, so you can switch to a fallback, warn customers and make decisions in minutes rather than hours.

5. Rehearse failover before you need it

A failover plan that has never been tested is a hope, not a plan. Run regular exercises that simulate the loss of a zone or a whole region, measure how long recovery takes, and fix what breaks. For some services, a multi-cloud or hybrid design that keeps a critical path running on a second provider or on-premise infrastructure will be worth the extra cost.

What happens next after the Google Cloud outage

Regulators and MPs are still gathering information, and Google’s full incident report is awaited. Whatever the outcome of the inquiries into the Google Cloud outage, the direction is clear. UK regulators are building the tools to supervise the largest cloud providers directly, and businesses that depend on them will be expected to show they have planned for failure. The organisations that recover fastest next time will be the ones that treat resilience as a design choice today.

How would your business cope if your cloud region went dark?

Cloud Technology Hub designs and runs resilient infrastructure across Azure, AWS and on-premise environments, with centralised logging and monitoring that does not depend on any single provider. Email info@technohub.cloud to book a cloud resilience review.

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