Google Cloud outage: problems fixed for ‘most‘ customers, as regulators push for details – as it happened

A power outage at a Google Cloud data centre near London has caused serious failures to services today, affecting operations for several UK banks.

Problems were first detected just after 7am this morning, disrupting “multiple services” in Google’s europe-west2 region (London).

Google blamed the problem on a ‘power issue’ – just afternoon today it said this event had been mitigated. By 1pm UK time services were recovering, and at 3pm Google said services were back online for most customers, with only “a very small number” still affected.

But by that time, millions of customers had been left unable to access and send cash at banks including Lloyds, HSBC and Revolut .

double quotation mark “We are currently experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services. We can confirm that all our customers’ money and data are safe. We’ve been working to fix the issue since it was identified this morning and apologise to anyone affected and for any inconvenience caused.”

double quotation mark “Our app is online and customers can log in normally, though we understand some are having issues with certain online services this morning. We are aware of similar issues affecting other organisations and are monitoring the situation closely.”

Legal proceedings were disrupted, because the video system used by defendants, lawyers and other parties to attend court hearings remotely across England and Wales which failed to work throughout the morning.

The City regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority , confirmed it was in touch with Google and seeking more information about the outage.

This outage will be the first major test for the FCA and Bank of England , since the City watchdogs were handed powers to regulate Google and other rival services that have been supplying “critical” cloud services to UK financial firms this summer.

Tech experts said the outage was another reminder of the dangers of relying on a small number of technology providers for cloud services, a year after problems at Amazon Cloud caused more widespread disruption.