Google says cloud outage affecting UK banks and websites resolved

Google Cloud says it has resolved disruption at its UK cloud site which caused an outage affecting UK banks, businesses and the courts.

The company, one of a few large cloud computing firms whose infrastructure and services underpin many online platforms, reported an “issue with multiple services” at its London data centre complex “europe-west2” early on Tuesday.

Revolut, Lloyds Bank and HSBC were among popular UK services that confirmed disruption on Tuesday morning, after thousands of reports of problems were raised by users online.

The tech giant apologised to those affected and thanked customers for their patience.

“We have resolved a disruption to Google Cloud services at a third-party facility in our europe-west2 cloud region due to a power event,” a Google Cloud spokesperson said in a statement on Tuesday evening.

“Services have been restored.”

They added that the company would publish an analysis of the incident on its service health dashboard, external, where it provides customers with updates about the status of its cloud services globally.

Cloud computing giants like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud make their services available to clients in local or regional sites around the world, which they call “regions”, containing their data centres.

In updates to its service dashboard on Tuesday morning, Google Cloud had said a number of its cloud services were “experiencing elevated errors and intermittent network failures in europe-west2 region” – its UK cloud facility in London.

It later said that the issues had stemmed from a “power event” within one of its smaller data centre zones, europe-west2-b.

These seemingly affected a host of popular UK platforms and services, with customers flagging issues with sites including Royal Mail, DPD and e-bike service Forest.

The HM Courts and Tribunals Service also said it was aware of an issue affecting the video platform used for remote hearings.