Google Cloud says it has resolved a disruption at its London cloud region that hit UK banks, businesses and the courts. Revolut, Lloyds Bank and HSBC were among the services affected. Experts say the incident shows how many businesses rely on a few large cloud operators.
Google Cloud said it resolved the disruption at its UK cloud site, which had caused an outage affecting UK banks, businesses and the courts. The company reported an issue with multiple services at its London data centre complex early on Tuesday.
Revolut, Lloyds Bank and HSBC were among the UK services that confirmed disruption on Tuesday morning, after thousands of reports of problems were raised by users online. Customers also flagged issues with Royal Mail, DPD and e-bike service Forest. The HM Courts and Tribunals Service said it was aware of an issue affecting the video platform used for remote hearings.
Power event behind the disruption
Google Cloud later said the issues stemmed from a power event within one of its smaller data centre zones, europe-west2-b. In a statement on Tuesday evening, a spokesperson said the company had resolved the disruption at a third-party facility and that services had been restored.
The company said it would publish an analysis of the incident on its service health dashboard. However, Prof Feng Li of Bayes Business School said it was not yet clear what caused the power problem Google Cloud identified.
Revolut and Lloyds report service disruption
Banks appeared to be among the most badly affected. More than 1,500 reports of issues affecting Revolut services were flagged to an outage monitor shortly after 08:00 BST on Tuesday, and a Revolut spokesperson said some services were disrupted because of the Google Cloud outage.
Customers of Lloyds Bank, Halifax and Bank of Scotland, all owned by Lloyds Banking Group, also reported issues with some online banking services. A Lloyds spokesperson did not confirm the cause but said the bank expected all its services to be back to normal soon.
One small business, The Veg Box Company, was also hit. Its Guy Baybutt said the firm could not access its website to process orders and could not book parcels onto DPD's system.
A year after the AWS outage
Tuesday's incident came exactly one year after more than 1,000 sites, including UK banks, were knocked offline for hours during an outage at AWS' largest cloud site. Prof Feng Li of Bayes Business School said the Google Cloud outage is "a reminder of how deeply our economies depend on just a handful of cloud providers".
Source: BBC News
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