Several U.K. banking services and a range of websites and apps were disrupted by a power failure in Google Cloud’s London infrastructure on October 20, leaving customers unable to access accounts and complete everyday tasks.
The outage exposed how a technical failure at a shared supplier can affect seemingly unrelated businesses, raising questions about how organizations protect customer access when critical technology infrastructure fails.
On its service status page, Google attributed the disruption to a “power event” causing an outage within its europe-west2-b zone in London that began at 23:08 PDT (07:08 BST). The incident resulted in “elevated errors and intermittent network issues” across multiple services, including Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage and Google App Engine.
In a subsequent update at 05:10 PDT/13:10 BST, Google said the power event had been mitigated and services were recovering across most workloads, although some customers might still be unable to create new workloads.
Banking Services Hit by Cloud Disruption
U.K. fintech Revolut reported problems affecting account access, card payments, transfers and ATM withdrawals, stating on X:
“We are currently experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services. We can confirm that all our customers’ money and data are safe.”
Lloyds Banking Group, which owns Halifax, also acknowledged problems with some online services. HSBC and Bank of Scotland customers reported difficulties, while other affected services included delivery providers, retailers and property platforms.
The Down Detector platform, which tracks real-time service problems and outages, recorded reports involving Royal Mail, DPD, Rightmove, Screwfix, BT and Cloudflare. The HM Courts and Tribunals Service reported that the Cloud Video Platform used for remote hearings across England and Wales was also unavailable during the morning, potentially delaying court proceedings.
The disruptions indicated show how customers experience infrastructure failures as real consequences, such as an inability to pay for purchases or join a court hearing. Businesses also risk losing sales when customers cannot complete transactions.
Shared Infrastructure Creates Widespread Impact
The incident highlights the dependencies that sit behind digital customer experiences.
Dr Hamza Mutaher, Lecturer in Cyber Security at Birmingham City University, described the incident as a another wake-up call for businesses that depend on cloud servers.
“Different businesses can appear independent or separate to one another, whilst still relying on the same cloud infrastructure behind the scenes.”
“A disruption to that shared infrastructure can therefore have widespread knock-on effects, leaving customers unable to access otherwise unrelated services, especially when it involves a company like Google that is used by tens of thousands of organizations.”
While the network failures point to an availability problem, customers may be concerned about the safety of their money and personal information when a banking app stops working, even if the underlying problem concerns service availability rather than a breach.
Clear communication can help address those concerns while giving customers practical information about which services remain affected and what to do if a payment appears to have failed. As Dr. Mutaher told CX Today:
"Businesses should prioritize communication alongside restoring essential services. Tell customers what is affected, what alternatives are available, and when the next update will arrive, even if there is no confirmed fix time. Acknowledge the inconvenience, avoid speculative promises, and ensure customer-facing teams give consistent advice."
Cloud Resilience Requires More Than Recovery Plans
The outage also raises questions about how businesses prepare for the failure of a critical supplier.
A series of major infrastructure failures in late 2025 prompted similar warnings about businesses’ reliance on a small number of technology providers. An AWS outage in October disrupted banking services, government portals and consumer platforms, and was quickly followed by outages at Microsoft Azure affecting services across multiple regions, while a November Cloudflare outage affected websites and apps including ChatGPT, X, Spotify and Shopify.
