One Revolut customer wrote that their 71-year-old mother had waited an hour at a supermarket checkout on Tuesday because her card would not work, according to a post Cybernews quoted. Revolut blamed a Google Cloud outage, which Google traced to a power event in a single zone of its London region. Google now says it has mitigated the problem for most customers, yet Reuters reported that only six of the 27 services on Revolut’s UK status page were working at 17:00 GMT.
A Power Event in One Zone, Errors Across the Region
Google’s status page logged the first problems at 06:08 UTC on 20 October, which was 07:08 in London. The initial notice described “elevated errors and intermittent network failures” in the europe-west2 region. Google later named the cause: “A power event caused an outage within europe-west2-b zone,” one of three zones in its London region. Affected services included Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run, App Engine and Cloud Filestore.
Recovery came in stages. Google said the power event was mitigated and that it was prioritizing existing workloads, while warning that customers might not yet be able to create new workloads. It told customers to migrate affected workloads to another zone or region “if feasible.” By 14:03 UTC, according to The Register, Google said the issue was mitigated for most customers and that a very small number remained affected. It promised an analysis once its internal investigation ends, and had given no detail on what caused the power event itself.
Revolut Confirmed the Link, the Banks Have Not
Revolut tied its disruption to Google in its own words: “Due to a recent Google Cloud outage, customers may have experienced temporary service disruption on the Revolut app today.” Its status page flagged card payments, transfers, ATM withdrawals, currency exchange and stock trading. Euronews reported users hit in the UK, Ireland, France, Spain and Japan. Revolut also said customers’ money and data were safe.
Lloyds, Halifax, Bank of Scotland, HSBC and RBS all appeared in outage reports, but the evidence for a Google link is thinner. A Lloyds spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal that the bank was aware of similar issues affecting other organizations, and the Journal reported that its app stayed accessible while some web services had problems. Bloomberg reported problems at HSBC and RBS, and neither bank responded to its inquiries.
The courts offer a third case. The Criminal Bar Association said the Cloud Video Platform, which courts use for remote hearings, had been down across England and Wales since 10 a.m. UK time, and that many barristers could not proceed with trials and hearings. In Llanelli, court records gave “CVP DOWN NATIONALLY” as the reason two hearings were adjourned, Herald.Wales reported. The Ministry of Justice said by late afternoon that court systems were still not fully restored, according to Computer Weekly. No statement reported so far shows HM Courts and Tribunals Service tying the failure to Google Cloud, so that link rests on timing.
Mitigated Is the Vendor’s Word
Revolut’s recovery ran well past Google’s mitigation. Reuters reported that at 17:00 GMT only six of Revolut’s 27 listed services were working, support chat and internal transfers among them, while card payments, ATM withdrawals, currency exchange and stock trading were still disrupted. That was nearly three hours after Google’s 14:03 UTC update and almost 11 hours after the first error. Revolut said that evening that the issue was fixed and services were restored. One reading, consistent with Google’s own warning about creating new workloads, is that a customer’s recovery depends on rebuild work that starts only after the vendor stabilizes the zone. Nothing in the reporting so far confirms that, so it remains an inference.
Google’s account has a defensible core: the root cause sat in one of three zones, and by Google’s telling most customers were back by about 3 p.m. London time. Its wording did shift, though. The first notice described errors across the region, while the confirmed cause was one zone.
Zones exist to contain failures like this one, so the open question is why a single-zone power event reached so many services and customers. London has raised that question before. In July 2022, a heatwave cooling failure caused an outage of 18 hours and 23 minutes in europe-west2-a, and Google’s incident report said it had inadvertently changed traffic routing for internal services to avoid all three zones in the region, The Register reported. Whether Tuesday followed the same pattern is not yet known.
London Is Google’s Only UK Region
Google’s published location lists show London (europe-west2) as its only UK region. A firm can spread UK workloads across the three London zones, but it cannot spread them across UK regions. Google’s advice to move workloads elsewhere “if feasible” therefore points those firms toward a region in another country. Whether that is permitted depends on each firm’s data residency and regulatory obligations, which a status page cannot settle.
The Oversight Regime Is Three Months Old
On 13 July, HM Treasury’s designation of four providers took effect: Google Cloud EMEA Limited, Microsoft Ireland Operations Limited, Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL and Oracle Corporation UK Limited. Under the UK’s critical third parties regime, the Prudential Regulation Authority, the Financial Conduct Authority and the Bank of England can make rules for the services those providers supply to regulated firms, demand information and, in law firm Sullivan & Cromwell’s summary, “direct a CTP to take certain actions or to cease an activity.” The EU moved first: in November 2025, the European Supervisory Authorities named 19 providers, Google Cloud’s European arms among them, as critical under the Digital Operational Resilience Act, FStech reported.
The UK timetable is gradual. A designated provider owes an initial self-assessment within three months, a mark that arrived roughly a week before the outage. Mapping, first-round scenario testing and an incident management playbook exercise are due within 12 months. Designation also “does not remove the responsibility of regulated firms” for their own third-party risk, Sullivan & Cromwell notes.
Scrutiny arrived the same day. The Treasury Committee published a letter on 20 October from its chair, Dame Meg Hillier, to the Governor of the Bank of England and the chief executive of the FCA, asking how they will use their powers in response to the incident. An FCA spokesman told The Telegraph that the regulator was “aware of an incident affecting services provided by Google” and was engaging with Google and affected firms. The Bank of England and the PRA declined to comment. The date also echoes last year: twelve months earlier to the day, a 14-hour AWS outage in US-East-1 disrupted UK services including Lloyds and HMRC, Computer Weekly reported.
Vendor Status Is Not Customer Recovery
The implication is that a hyperscaler’s status page measures the hyperscaler’s recovery. A bank or a payments app has to measure the moment its own customers can transact again, and Tuesday’s timeline suggests the two can sit hours apart. Firms that have not rehearsed losing a zone, and timed the recovery from the customer’s side, will learn that number during an incident instead.
Two documents should settle most of what remains open. Google’s promised analysis should explain why a single-zone power event produced errors across the region, and the regulators’ reply to the Treasury Committee should show what the new powers allow in practice. Until then, Revolut’s timeline shows how long “mitigated” can take to reach a customer.
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