Google Cloud resolves London data centre outage affecting UK banks

Google Cloud has successfully restored services at its London data centre following a significant power event that caused widespread disruptions across the United Kingdom. The outage, which occurred at the "europe-west2-b" data centre zone, impacted several major financial institutions, government services, and various business operations throughout the day. Google confirmed that technical issues have been addressed, and operations have returned to normal after a period of intermittent network failures and elevated error rates.

The disruption had a noticeable effect on the UK's banking sector, with customers of major banks such as Lloyds, HSBC, and the digital banking platform Revolut reporting difficulties accessing services. Beyond the financial sector, the HM Courts and Tribunals Service also experienced service interruptions, affecting legal proceedings and administrative functions. Google has issued a formal apology to its customers for the inconvenience caused by the unexpected downtime and stated it will publish a full analysis of the incident to provide transparency on the root cause.

This latest incident has reignited concerns among technology experts regarding the heavy reliance of critical infrastructure on a small number of global cloud service providers. Industry analysts pointed out that this event parallels a similar outage that occurred roughly one year ago, which impacted over 1,000 websites. To mitigate the risk of such failures, experts are urging businesses to implement multi-region redundancy strategies, ensuring that their digital operations are spread across different geographical locations rather than relying on a single data centre zone.