Google has not published a cause, and reports tie the damage to the London region
21 OCTOBER UPDATE: Google reports that all issues are addressed and services should be restoring/restored for all affected customers. See report from Google Cloud Service Health monitoring.
The Google Cloud outage on 20 October disrupted Revolut and several UK banks from the London region.TF examines the damage, the open questions and the evidence for a Europe-wide spread.
What’s Happening & Why It Matters
What Failed
Google Cloud reported problems at 0608 GMT on Tuesday 20 October, according to Quartz. The trouble affected europe-west2, the London region. Google said its engineers were investigating. The company advised customers to move work to other regions if feasible.
Reuters, via Global Banking & Finance, lists Cloud Filestore and Google Kubernetes Engine among the disrupted services. Google gave no cause in the reports I read.
Who Felt the Outage
Revolut suffered the worst disruption. Card payments, transfers, cash machine withdrawals, currency swaps and share trading went down or worked in part. Revolut said customer money and data were safe, and the company apologised.
Lloyds Banking Group said its app stayed up while some web services failed. HSBC and Royal Bank of Scotland reported problems too.
Did the Outage Spread Across Europe?
Evidence for a Europe-wide spread is thin. Reuters reports ING Germany customers had trouble logging into online banking and the app. Reuters calls the ING cause a technical problem and does not tie the issue to Google.
Quartz does not report a spread beyond London. One source says europe-west2 serves UK and wider European workloads, so wider impact is possible. No source confirms how many customers or transactions the outage touched.
The Timeline Is Unclear
Quartz does not say when service returned. One report says Google restored the region by midday. Another Reuters-based report gives mixed dates, with 19 October in a takeaways box and 20 October in the body. TF treats 20 October as the date.
TF covered the other side of digital risk in TF Cybercrime Round-Up: 6-11 October 2026. An outage needs no attacker to freeze payments.
My take: One cloud region took down a digital bank and slowed high street banks. Banks running on a single region carry concentration risk. Revolut and Lloyds face questions on failover design.
TF Summary: What’s Next
Google will publish a post-incident report naming the cause. Banks will explain customer impact to regulators. Revolut has to say whether customers lost payments or fees. Customers may seek compensation or service credits.
MY FORECAST: Google will name a root cause within two weeks. UK regulators will request incident reports from affected banks. At least one bank will announce a multi-region cloud plan. Cloud concentration will feature in the next UK financial stability review.
Related Stories
- TF Cybercrime Round-Up: 6-11 October 2026
- Microsoft Withdraws from Nscale’s Essex AI Data Centre Over Power Supply
- Data Centres Are War Targets in Ukraine, Russia and Iran
- OpenAI Hacks Crypto Wallet, More Websites
- Microsoft’s Nadella and Smith Call for an AI Emergency Brake