Google Cloud London Outage Linked to Power Event, Recovery Tentatively Set for 1300 UTC
A power event disrupted Google Cloud’s London region, affecting major banks and retailers, with full service restoration expected by early afternoon UTC.
Key points
- Google Cloud attributes the outage in the europe-west-2-b zone to a power event that began at 0608 UTC.
- Major customers including Lloyds Bank, HSBC, and Revolut experienced service disruptions during the incident.
- Full recovery is tentatively scheduled for 1300 UTC, with engineers prioritizing existing workload restoration.
Google Cloud blamed a power event for a widespread outage affecting its London region, disrupting services for numerous high-profile customers. The incident began at 0608 UTC when the europe-west-2-b availability zone, one of three local zones in the London region, started experiencing failures.
According to The Register, Google Cloud stated at 1158 UTC that full recovery of workloads should be completed tentatively by 1300 UTC. The company noted that while the power event itself is mitigated, customers may still be unable to create new workloads as engineers prioritize restoring existing services.
Context and Background
The outage impacts multiple core Google Cloud products, including BigQuery Data Transfer Service, Cloud Filestore, Cloud Run, and Google App Engine. Other affected services include Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Managed Service for Apache Kafka.
Dr. Amro Al-Said Ahmad, a computer science lecturer at Keele University, told The Register that the incident highlights the fragility of modern cloud ecosystems. He estimated that a total of 38 services were down, noting that failures in a core cloud region extend far beyond directly affected services.
Who Is Affected
A wide range of prominent organizations reported disruptions, including Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Royal Mail, Rightmove, DPD, BT, Cloudflare, Screwfix, and Revolut. This follows previous reporting by Threat Times regarding service interruptions for Revolut and other firms during a Google Cloud London region failure.
Google declined to provide further details beyond its status page when asked by The Register. The status page indicated that engineers are actively working on restoring services, with an update expected at the tentative 1300 UTC recovery window.
What should you do?
Organizations relying on Google Cloud services in the London region should monitor official status pages for real-time updates on service restoration. IT teams should verify the health of critical workloads and assess whether any data integrity issues arose during the downtime.
What to do and how to stay safe: Google Cloud
- Monitor vendor status pages for official confirmation of full service restoration before resuming normal operations.
- Verify the integrity of critical data and workloads that were active during the outage window.
- Review multi-region redundancy plans to ensure failover mechanisms functioned as intended during the disruption.
- Communicate proactively with internal stakeholders about potential residual impacts on dependent applications.
Step-by-step guide: Mobile Device Security: How to Protect Data Beyond Passwords
General security guidance from the Threat Times newsroom. It is not confirmed advice from the organisations named in this story.
Frequently asked questions
What caused the Google Cloud London outage?
Google Cloud attributed the outage to a power event that affected the europe-west-2-b availability zone.
When is full service expected to be restored?
Google Cloud stated that full recovery is tentatively due by 1300 UTC, with an update expected at that time.
Which major companies were affected by the outage?
Affected customers included Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Revolut, Royal Mail, Rightmove, DPD, BT, Cloudflare, and Screwfix.
