A power fault in one of three zones in Google Cloud's London region knocked out banking apps, couriers and the UK courts' video platform for hours on 20 October 2026. Google says the fault hit the europe-west2-b zone. None of the reports reviewed mention a hacker attack.

The outage began at 06:08 UTC, or 07:08 London time. Google's first public message came at about 09:35 and spoke of "increased errors and intermittent network problems". It named the cause at 12:12. Some reports say the outage began "shortly after 6am" UK time, so the start time differs by source.

Financial services were hit hardest. Revolut said card payments, cash machine withdrawals and transfers stopped, and that "all customer money and data are safe". Halifax reported problems with its app, while Lloyds and HSBC said customers had trouble reaching services. Banks were not all hit equally, so one bank's app might fail while another's still worked. Banks and payment firms reported on their own services, as Revolut and Lloyds did.

The Courts and Tribunals Service confirmed a problem with the video platform used for remote hearings. Not all firms have officially linked their outages to Google, and part of the list comes from user reports on Downdetector. Spotify does not appear in any of the reports reviewed for this outage.

Three zones in the London region

A cloud provider rents out servers, databases and networks. Banks and apps use them instead of their own data centres. The centres are grouped into regions, and each region is split into zones. Google's London region has three zones, and the outage data show only one went down.

Firms that keep everything in one zone go down with it. Services built to spread across zones should survive the loss of one, and Google says this cuts the risk of a wider outage. But Google listed 38 affected products, and some regional services returned errors without the provider saying why.

The same happened in 2022, when a cooling failure hit the same region. Google then admitted that regional services were hit, even though they were designed to survive the loss of one zone.

Google advises customers to move their workloads to another zone or region. Paris and Frankfurt were not affected. During the recovery, systems that were already running had priority, and new ones could not be created. Google published updates on the outage on its service status dashboard. At 15:03 it said the problem was contained for most customers and that "very few" were still affected. It added that there would be no more updates on the dashboard.

Power fault, no sign of a cyber attack

Google speaks of a power fault and does not mention an attack, and the reports say no cyber attack has been confirmed. But there is no final confirmation: Google has not published an analysis of the cause and has not explained why the power failed.

London has seen a similar outage before. On 12 August 2024, both the main and backup power failed at a Google site in the city after a substation accident. According to the service, connections were disrupted for between 40 minutes and two hours 12 minutes.

Warnings to users and oversight

After the Amazon Web Services outage on 20 October 2025, the UK consumer group Which? warned of fake messages in the name of Amazon and banks that ask for personal and financial details. Its editor Lauren Deitz advises anyone who gets an alarming message to contact the organisation it claims to come from by another route. She also says people should keep their phone free for emergencies because lines are overloaded. Jennifer Ross advises people to keep evidence of affected payments in case they complain later.

The UK financial regulator, the FCA, is in contact with Google and is asking for details. The PRA, which also supervises the sector, has contacted the company too. In July the UK named Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft and Oracle as critical providers to the financial sector, and this outage is their first real test.

Google has promised to publish an analysis when its internal investigation ends.