Multiple Google Cloud services failed in the company’s London region on Tuesday, and the disruption did not stay in London. British digital bank Revolut reported an outage across most of its services worldwide, and a person familiar with the matter told Reuters that Revolut’s outage was related to the Google Cloud disruption.
Google said its engineering team was investigating an issue affecting its London-based europe-west2 data center, and it did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for further details. For customers of one of the world’s largest cloud providers, Tuesday morning became a lesson in how much of modern banking runs through a single availability zone.
One zone in London
The downtime began at 0608 UTC, according to Google’s status page as reported by The Register. The affected zone, europe-west2-b, is one of three local availability zones in the London region — zones that exist precisely to protect customers against hardware or local failures. Google said: “Multiple Google Cloud services are experiencing elevated errors and intermittent network failures in europe-west2 region.”
Among the services Google confirmed as impacted were BigQuery Data Transfer Service, Cloud Filestore, Cloud Run, Google App Engine, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, Google Kubernetes Engine and Managed Service for Apache Kafka; summaries of the status page listed a broader set, including Compute Engine, Cloud Storage and BigQuery. “Our engineering team continues to investigate the issue,” Google said. “We apologize to all who are affected by the disruption.” Asked about workarounds, Google said there were none for now, though it advised impacted customers to try migrating workloads to another available zone or region where feasible. It gave no estimated time of recovery.
Revolut’s morning
Revolut’s own status page showed most of its services unavailable or partially unavailable, including card payments and ATM withdrawals. BleepingComputer reported that the outage affected 28 of the company’s services, among them sign-ins, card payments, transfers, currency exchange, stock trading and live support chat. BleepingComputer also noted that Reuters linked the Revolut outage to the europe-west2 disruption after a “power event” — a characterization of the cause that Google itself had not published.
“We are currently experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services. We can confirm that all our customers’ money and data are safe,” Revolut said. “We’ve been working to fix the issue since it was identified this morning and apologise to anyone affected and for any inconvenience caused.” More than 1,500 people reported Revolut problems to the outage tracker Downdetector earlier on Tuesday morning. The scale of the company explains the worldwide footprint: Revolut provides banking, money management and investment services to more than 80 million customers across more than 160 countries and regions, including 800,000 business customers, according to BleepingComputer.
The wider UK picture is murkier
Downdetector also showed spikes on Tuesday morning for Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Bank of Scotland, Halifax, Royal Mail, DPD and the property site Rightmove. But reports on a tracker are not the same as a confirmed cause, and the link to Google Cloud has not been confirmed for those services. A Lloyds spokesperson said its app was not down, while acknowledging that some customers were having problems with some online services and that the bank was monitoring the situation closely; Halifax told a customer it was aware some people were having issues with its app and online banking. One service did name Google directly: budgeting app Emma told customers it was down because of the Google Cloud outage affecting services in London since 7 a.m., calling it a technical outage, not a security issue. Separately, ING Germany said there were problems logging into its online banking and app due to a technical issue, without tying it to Google.
Why one zone can take down a bank
Availability zones are supposed to be the firewall against exactly this: run a service across zones, and one zone’s failure becomes an inconvenience rather than an outage. Tuesday’s incident — whatever its root cause, which Google had not announced — showed how that protection fails in practice when a customer’s critical path still runs through a single zone, or when the failing component is shared networking rather than a single rack. For Revolut’s customers, the distinction between “our bank is down” and “our bank’s cloud zone is down” made no practical difference at the checkout. Until Google publishes a cause and a timeline, the confirmed facts remain narrow: one London zone, elevated errors, a global fintech dark — and a long list of other services whose problems may or may not share the same origin.
