A power outage at a Google Cloud data centre near London disrupted banking and online services across the United Kingdom on Tuesday, affecting customers of Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC, as well as several other businesses.
Google said the incident began at 0608 GMT and was caused by a power-related problem at its europe-west cloud region. By 1210 GMT, most services had returned to normal, around six hours after the disruption started.
“We are seeing the recovery of services for most workloads in europe-west,” Google said in a service health update.
The outage affected several Revolut services, including cash withdrawals from ATMs, bank transfers and bank card top-ups. A source close to the matter attributed the disruption to the Google Cloud failure.
Lloyds and HSBC also confirmed that some customers experienced problems accessing their banking services.
“We understand the root issues have been resolved, so we expect all our services to be back to normal soon,” Lloyds said in a statement on Tuesday afternoon.
HSBC said customers had experienced “difficulties accessing our services” and confirmed it would continue monitoring the situation, which was also affecting other organisations.
A Revolut spokesperson said the company had been working to resolve the issue since it was identified. The bank apologised to customers for the inconvenience and reassured them that their money and personal data remained safe.
The disruption extended beyond financial services. Internet monitoring website Downdetector recorded hundreds of reports of problems affecting UK businesses, including property platform Rightmove, delivery company DPD and the Royal Mail postal service.
Google said it would publish a detailed report on the incident in the coming days.
The outage has renewed concerns about the growing dependence of businesses on a small number of major cloud computing providers. These companies supply computing power, data storage and other digital infrastructure, allowing organisations to operate online services without investing in their own large-scale data centres.
The market has increasingly become dominated by three major providers: Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. Their extensive infrastructure supports large volumes of data and applications used by businesses across multiple industries.
Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Surrey, said these facilities remained vulnerable to local infrastructure failures. Such incidents could have widespread consequences when many organisations rely on a limited number of providers.
Woodward warned that dependence on these companies was growing as demand for artificial intelligence services increased, placing additional pressure on large cloud computing networks.
A major outage affecting Amazon’s cloud services last year also disrupted online services used by gaming, business and transport companies, temporarily making parts of the internet inaccessible.
Tuesday’s incident highlighted how a problem at a single facility can affect organisations across different sectors, even when those businesses operate independently. It also raised questions about whether companies should diversify their cloud infrastructure to reduce the risk of widespread disruption.
