Google Cloud outage disrupts Revolut, Lloyds, HSBC banking services in UK

A power outage at a Google Cloud data centre near London disrupted banking services at Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC on Tuesday, leaving customers unable to access some digital banking services.

The US technology giant said the disruption began at 0608 GMT and affected multiple services in its London-based europe-west2 region, causing elevated error rates and intermittent network failures.

Revolut customers experienced problems with ATM withdrawals, bank transfers and card top-ups, according to a source familiar with the matter who linked the disruption to the Google Cloud outage.

Lloyds and HSBC also confirmed that some customers were experiencing difficulties accessing their banking services.

“We are aware some customers are having issues with our app and online banking,” Lloyds said.

HSBC said customers were experiencing “difficulties accessing our services”, adding that it would monitor the situation, which was also affecting other organisations.

Google said the outage was caused by a power-related incident at its data centre and initially projected that services would fully recover by around 1300 GMT on Tuesday.

In an earlier service update, the company said multiple cloud services in the affected region were experiencing intermittent failures.

The disruption also appeared to affect other businesses, with internet monitoring platform Downdetector recording hundreds of reports involving services including property website Rightmove and postal operator Royal Mail.

Revolut said it had been working to resolve the issue since it was identified and apologised to affected customers.

“We can confirm that all our customers’ money and data are safe,” a spokesperson for the digital bank said.

The incident highlights the potential for disruptions at major cloud infrastructure providers to affect multiple businesses and essential digital services simultaneously.