Google Cloud Outage: UK Banks Hit in London Power Event

Millions of bank customers across the United Kingdom woke up to failed card payments, frozen banking apps and broken checkouts on Tuesday, October 20, 2026, after a major Google Cloud outage knocked out services in its London data centre region. The incident began at 06:08 GMT (11:08 AM Pakistan time) and hit “multiple” cloud services with elevated errors and intermittent network failures in the europe-west2 region, according to Google’s own status page. Google later blamed a “power event” at the facility, said the incident had been mitigated, and promised full recovery by 1300 GMT (6:00 PM PKT).

What exactly went down

Google Cloud’s status dashboard told the story in one line: “Multiple Google Cloud services are experiencing elevated errors and intermittent network failures in europe-west2 region.” Europe-west2 is Google’s London region, so the blast radius was concentrated on UK-hosted services.

The company’s engineering team said it was investigating the root cause, with no workaround available in the early hours. Later updates brought better news: Google said the “power event” had been mitigated, services were recovering and existing workloads were being prioritised, though connection failures and delays kept rippling through the day.

If you have ever wondered what “the cloud is down” actually looks like, Tuesday was the textbook case: a power event in one region cascading into banking apps, delivery tracking, property listings and even public services within hours.

Banks, mail, retail: the businesses hit hardest

The heaviest impact landed on financial services. Digital bank Revolut, which serves more than 80 million customers globally including 13 million in the UK, reported widespread disruption. Card payments, transfers, ATM withdrawals, currency exchange and even stock trading were unavailable or only partially working for many users. A source close to the matter attributed Revolut’s problems to the Google Cloud outage.

Revolut moved quickly to reassure customers. “We can confirm that all our customers’ money and data are safe,” the bank said in a statement, adding that it had been working to fix the issue since it was identified that morning and apologising for the inconvenience.

It was not alone. Downdetector, the tracker that logs real-time user reports of service disruptions, showed hundreds of reports piling up against Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Bank of Scotland and Halifax. Halifax told customers on social media that some were having issues with its app and website, advising them to call if they needed urgent help. Lloyds, meanwhile, told the BBC its app was functioning normally but acknowledged that “we understand some are having issues with certain online services,” adding it was monitoring the situation.

Beyond banking, the user reports kept coming: property portal Rightmove, postal service Royal Mail, delivery giant DPD, retailer Screwfix, broadcaster Sky and web host SiteGround all appeared on the disruption lists. Budgeting app Emma said its service was down due to the Google Cloud problem affecting London “since 7 am,” stressing that “this is a technical outage, not a security issue.”

Public services were caught up too. NHS services, HM Courts and Tribunals Service and other UK government websites surfaced in the disruption reports, with the Criminal Bar Association warning that its video platform was down across large parts of England and Wales.

One important caveat, and it matters: it has not been confirmed whether every service that reported problems was directly affected by the Google Cloud disruption, or even whether all of them use Google’s services. Several outlets, including Reuters, were explicit about this. When a big name goes down, outage trackers inevitably sweep up unrelated glitches in the same wave of attention.

Why this should matter to readers in Pakistan

This was a UK-region incident, but cloud outages do not respect borders. A growing number of Pakistani startups, banks, retailers and media companies run part of their stack on Google Cloud, or depend on global services that do. When europe-west2 went dark, anyone in Pakistan relying on an affected vendor’s dashboard, API or checkout flow would have felt it just as sharply as a customer in London.

The lesson for local businesses is an old one: if your entire operation leans on a single cloud region, a “power event” thousands of miles away becomes your crisis. Multi-region deployments and a backup payment rail are no longer luxuries; they are the difference between a bad morning and a lost day of revenue.

For everyday users, the rule of thumb is simple: check the provider’s status dashboard before hammering retry, avoid resetting passwords or reinstalling apps in a panic, and keep an offline fallback for anything time-critical.

A familiar pattern

Tuesday’s chaos had a strange echo. Anadolu Ajansi noted that a similar large internet outage occurred exactly a year ago, on October 20, 2025, when more than 1,000 websites and apps, including Lloyds Bank and Snapchat, were taken offline. The internet’s backbone is getting more concentrated, not less, which means single points of failure keep making headlines.

Google was prioritising the recovery of existing workloads through the afternoon, with full restoration expected by 6:00 PM Pakistan time. What exactly caused the power event will matter to every business deciding where to host its next critical service.