Google Cloud London Zone Failure Disrupts Revolut, HSBC, Royal Mail
A failure in europe-west2-b has taken down key Google services, impacting banking and logistics firms with no estimated recovery time.
Key points
- The outage began at 0608 UTC in the europe-west2-b availability zone in London.
- Major customers including Revolut, Lloyds, HSBC, and Royal Mail reported service disruptions.
- Google has confirmed no workarounds are available and has not provided an estimated time for recovery.
Google Cloud’s europe-west2-b availability zone in London began experiencing failures at 0608 UTC, causing widespread disruptions for customers relying on the infrastructure. According to Google’s status page, multiple services are seeing elevated errors and intermittent network issues, with no estimated time for recovery provided yet.
The incident has impacted a broad range of Google Cloud products, including BigQuery Data Transfer Service, Cloud Filestore, Cloud Run, and Google Kubernetes Engine. Google App Engine, NetApp Volumes, and Managed Service for Apache Kafka are also affected. The company stated that its engineering team is investigating but offered no immediate workaround for affected users.
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Impact on Financial and Logistics Services
The failure in this single availability zone has cascaded to major organizations that depend on Google’s infrastructure for critical operations. According to Down Detector, Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Royal Mail, and Revolut are among the entities experiencing issues. Other affected companies include Rightmove, DPD, BT, Cloudflare, and Screwfix, indicating a broad reach beyond just financial institutions.
Revolut reported a widespread service outage that directly impacted its customers’ ability to use card payments and withdraw cash from ATMs. A person familiar with the matter told Reuters that Revolut’s outage was directly related to the Google Cloud disruption. The digital bank confirmed on X that it is working to fix the issue, stating that customer money and data remain safe despite the service interruption.
Context and Regional Scope
The europe-west2-b zone is one of three availability zones in the London region, designed to protect against hardware or regional failures. The fact that a single zone failure has caused such significant disruption suggests that some customers may not have implemented high-availability architectures across multiple zones. As Threat Times reported on 2026-10-21, Google Cloud previously highlighted distributed inference capabilities, but this incident underscores the risks of single-zone dependency for production workloads.
ING Germany also reported technical issues preventing customers from logging into online banking and the mobile app. Reuters did not link ING’s problems to the Google Cloud outage, and ING has not explained the cause. It remains unclear if these issues are coincidental or part of a broader trend of infrastructure instability.
What should you do?
Google plans to update customers at around 0930 UTC regarding the status of the outage. Until then, organizations relying on Google Cloud services in the europe-west2 region should monitor official status pages for updates. Users of affected services like Revolut may experience disruptions to payment processing and ATM access.
What to do and how to stay safe: Google Cloud
- Check Google Cloud’s official status page for real-time updates on the europe-west2 region and specific service availability.
- Monitor your own service dashboards to identify which workloads are impacted and whether they are isolated to the affected zone.
- If you rely on single-zone deployments, review your architecture to ensure critical services span multiple availability zones for better resilience.
- Communicate proactively with your customers or stakeholders about potential service disruptions and expected recovery timelines based on vendor updates.
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
Which Google Cloud services are affected by the London outage?
Affected services include BigQuery Data Transfer Service, Cloud Filestore, Cloud Run, Google App Engine, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Managed Service for Apache Kafka.
Is there an estimated time for recovery?
No, Google has not provided an estimated time for recovery and stated there are no workarounds available at this time.
Are other cloud providers affected by this outage?
The source material only reports disruptions to Google Cloud services; there is no mention of outages at other cloud providers.
