A Google Cloud outage disrupted banking services across Britain on 20 October, affecting card payments and cash withdrawals at Revolut as engineers investigated failures in the company's London data centre.
The disruption began at 06:08 GMT in Google's europe-west2 cloud region, according to the company's official service health dashboard, which identified widespread errors and intermittent network failures.
British digital bank Revolut reported that several of its services were unavailable or operating with limited functionality, including card transactions and cash withdrawals from automated teller machines.
"We can confirm that all our customers' money and data are safe," Revolut said in a post on X, acknowledging the interruption to its services.
A person familiar with the situation told Reuters that Revolut's difficulties were connected to the Google Cloud outage. The bank's status page showed that most of its services had been affected to varying degrees.
The disruption also coincided with technical problems reported by other financial institutions, including Halifax and Lloyds Bank, according to the Financial Times.
Google investigates London failures
Google said its engineering teams were working to identify and address the problem affecting its London cloud infrastructure.
The company's incident dashboard listed numerous affected products, including Google Cloud Storage, Compute Engine, Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Google Kubernetes Engine, BigQuery and Cloud Firestore.
These services support applications, databases, computing infrastructure and online systems operated by businesses and software developers.
The company reported elevated error rates and intermittent network failures, which can prevent applications from communicating reliably with the cloud systems on which they depend.
In its 04:00 Pacific time update, Google said the investigation was continuing and apologised to affected customers.
The company also identified a possible temporary measure for some customers: moving affected workloads to another available cloud region or zone, where technically feasible.
Google said Looker Studio was not affected by the incident.
Financial services affected
The disruption extended beyond Revolut, although the causes of every reported banking problem were not immediately established.
ING Germany separately acknowledged technical difficulties preventing some customers from accessing online banking and its mobile application, Reuters reported.
The Financial Times also reported interruptions affecting Halifax, a major British banking brand belonging to Lloyds Banking Group.
The problems illustrate how failures in shared cloud infrastructure can affect several independently operated financial services at the same time.
Google Cloud provides computing, networking, database and storage services to businesses that use its infrastructure to operate websites, applications and other digital platforms.
Its europe-west2 region serves customers from infrastructure located in London. The company's incident dashboard identified that region, rather than its entire global network, as the location affected by the disruption.
The official incident record had not established the underlying cause or provided a confirmed time for full restoration in the updates reviewed.
Google's service health page remained the company's primary channel for publishing technical updates on the incident and its affected products.
