Full Breakdown
Google Cloud Outage Disrupts Revolut and Other UK Services
By Drooid · · How we work
Core Event: London Cloud Disruption Impacts Financial Apps
On October 20 a failure in Google’s London-based europe-west2 cloud region caused widespread errors across dozens of Google Cloud products. The outage coincided with a loss of functionality for the digital-banking platform Revolut and several other financial and public-service providers in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Background & Context
Regulators have increasingly flagged the financial sector’s dependence on third-party cloud providers. In July the United Kingdom designated four tech firms—including Google Cloud EMEA—as critical third-party suppliers for banking, placing them under direct oversight. The European Union similarly listed Google Cloud among 19 critical computing providers for its finance industry in 2025. These designations underscore how essential cloud infrastructure has become for modern banking operations.
Timeline
- October 19 (occurred) – Google’s incident log records the problem originating at 23:08 Pacific (06:08 UTC) in the europe-west2-b zone of its London region.
- October 20 (occurred) – At 07:08 UK time Google reported elevated errors and intermittent network failures in europe-west2. Revolut’s services began to fail around 08:00 BST, roughly an hour after the cloud incident started.
Data & Statistics
- Google listed 36 affected products, including Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage and BigQuery.
- Revolut’s UK status page marked 30 services as partially unavailable, covering sign-up, sign-in, card payments, transfers, cash withdrawals, currency exchange, trading and identity checks.
- Downdetector logged more than 1,500 user reports of Revolut problems shortly after 08:00 BST, alongside reports affecting Lloyds Bank, HSBC, the National Health Service (NHS) England, Royal Mail, Rightmove and delivery firm DPD.
- Revolut serves over 80 million customers worldwide, including 13 million in the UK.
Official Statements & Responses
Google’s engineering team confirmed the incident, stating that the power event in the london zone had been mitigated and that customers should, where possible, shift workloads to another zone or region. The company added that it was continuing to investigate the root cause and had no immediate workaround.
Revolut issued a public notice that its app and backend systems were experiencing a “service disruption affecting multiple services.”
Other affected firms, such as ING Germany and Halifax Bank, reported login and app problems but did not provide detailed technical explanations.
Conflicting Reports & Gaps
While several outlets (Straitstimes, The Next Web, The Guardian) reported that Revolut’s outage was directly linked to the Google Cloud disruption, analysis from Streamlinefeed cautioned that the overlap alone does not prove causation. The provider’s incident notices did not formally attribute Revolut’s service loss to the cloud event, and Sky News noted that not every reported problem could be definitively traced to the same technical fault. The precise mechanism by which the zone-level failure propagated to Revolut’s services therefore remains unconfirmed.
Verbatim Quotes
- “We apologize to all who are affected by the disruption,” — Alphabet’s Google
- “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.” — Revolut
- “Our engineering team continues to investigate the issue. We apologise to all who are affected by the disruption.” — Alphabet’s Google