Revolut’s Google Cloud Outage Exposes Shared Risk…

Revolut, Lloyds Banking Group and HSBC were among UK financial institutions hit by service disruptions on Tuesday, Oct. 20, after a power failure at a Google Cloud facility serving the London region. Google traced the incident to its europe-west2-b availability zone. The event began at 07:08 BST and was listed as lasting seven hours and 52 minutes, though recovery started after about six hours. Google closed the incident at around 15:00 BST.

Google said the power event at a third-party facility caused elevated errors and intermittent network failures across parts of europe-west2. Affected products included Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage and App Engine. The company has not published a completed root-cause analysis explaining the equipment failure or why redundancy did not prevent wider disruption. Google has promised a post-incident analysis.

At Revolut, customers faced interruptions to sign-ins, card payments, transfers, ATM withdrawals, identity verification, customer support, currency exchange and stock and crypto trading. The fintech said customer money and data remained safe. Reuters reported that at 17:00 GMT only six of 27 service categories on Revolut’s UK status page were operating normally. Revolut has more than 80 million retail customers globally, including about 13 million in the UK. Lloyds, including Halifax, acknowledged online banking problems, while HSBC and Bank of Scotland customers reported access difficulties. Royal Mail, DPD, Rightmove and court video hearings also reported issues.

Regulatory scrutiny

The Financial Conduct Authority said it was engaging with Google and affected firms to assess the impact. The Prudential Regulation Authority was also understood to be seeking information. Reuters reported that the European Banking Authority contacted Google Cloud on Oct. 21, and the Treasury Committee wrote to the Bank of England and FCA requesting details on the response, scale and financial harm.

The outage tests operational-resilience rules under which firms had to complete mapping and testing of important business services by March 31, 2025. Outsourcing does not remove a bank’s responsibility for service continuity. Google Cloud EMEA is among the first critical third-party providers under UK direct oversight, alongside AWS, Microsoft and Oracle. Dr Hamza Mutaher of Birmingham City University noted that independent businesses can depend on the same cloud infrastructure, allowing one supplier failure to disrupt multiple customer services. Revolut said it is reviewing the incident; it has not quantified losses or compensation costs.