Somebody check the plug! Google Cloud says it has fixed an outage at its London cloud region that hit UK banks, businesses and even the courts on Tuesday, the BBC reported.
Google said the trouble came from a “power event” at a third-party facility in its europe-west2 region, inside one of its smaller data center zones, europe-west2-b. Earlier in the day, its status page described “elevated errors and intermittent network failures.” Google apologized and says it will publish an analysis of what went wrong.
The fallout was real. Revolut, Lloyds Bank and HSBC confirmed disruption after thousands of user complaints, and more than 1,500 reports about Revolut alone hit an outage tracker shortly after 8am UK time. Customers also flagged problems with Royal Mail, DPD and e-bike service Forest. HM Courts and Tribunals Service said the video platform used for remote hearings was affected.
One Revolut customer in Glasgow told the BBC she couldn’t pay for parking at a shopping center. A small veg-box business in Preston said it couldn’t download orders or book parcels, and lost sales while customers couldn’t reach its website. Revolut says services are fully restored and money and data “remained safe throughout.”
The timing is almost comical: the BBC notes it came exactly ONE YEAR after an AWS outage knocked more than 1,000 sites offline, UK banks included. “Google Cloud’s outage is a reminder of how deeply our economies depend on just a handful of cloud providers,” said Prof Feng Li of Bayes Business School. One power hiccup, and a chunk of the country can’t pay for parking. Resilient!
Featured image: editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.
Sources: BBC News; also reported by the Guardian
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