On October 20, 2026, a Google Cloud outage linked to a power failure in London temporarily knocked out multiple critical services across the UK. The disruption was traced to the europe-west2-b zone inside Google’s London region.
As a result, several services went offline, including:
- banking apps,
- a property listings site,
- a parcel courier service,
- parts of England and Wales’s court video system.
Engineers worked through the afternoon to bring affected services back online.
Timeline confusion
The timing of the incident is a key point for IT teams assessing the outage. Reports describe the disruption as starting either late on October 19, 2026, or during the morning of October 20, 2026. There is no single, fully agreed timeline across all outlets covering the story.
That ambiguity is notable in itself. Even hours into recovery, there was still no authoritative minute-by-minute account of the outage, only a converging set of independent reports from TechRadar and other sources.
Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC
Among the most visible casualties was Revolut. The digital bank reported disruption to multiple services, including card payments and ATM withdrawals.
Revolut moved quickly to address the main concern during any fintech disruption – the safety of customer assets – stating:
“We can confirm that all our customers’ money and data are safe.”
The incident is also described as affecting other major banks, including Lloyds and HSBC, as part of wider banking disruption tied to the same Google Cloud outage.
Source: Gündəm · tech-insider.org
