A major Google Cloud outage has disrupted hundreds of websites and apps, affecting banking services, Royal Mail, Rightmove, NHS England and parts of the court system.
The disruption began at about 7am BST and has been linked to problems at Google’s London region, including its europe-west2-b data centre.
Google said its engineering team was investigating the incident. In an update, the company said a “power event” had caused an outage within the zone, but that the event had been mitigated.
“Partial mitigation to infrastructure services will be observed within the next 30 minutes and the remaining services will be mitigated there after,” Google said.
The company apologised to those affected and said it would provide a further update with details of the incident.
Banking apps hit by Google Cloud outage
Down Detector, which monitors user reports of service problems, recorded issues affecting Rightmove, Halifax, Lloyds Bank, Revolut, HSBC and Royal Mail, among other services.
By 9am, there had been 480 reports of disruption affecting the Lloyds Bank app and website. Of those users, 36 per cent said they were unable to log in, 31 per cent reported problems using online banking and 25 per cent said they could not use the app.
Halifax said it was aware that some customers were experiencing problems with its app and online services.
Budgeting app Emma also confirmed that it had been affected, saying the disruption was “not a security issue”.
“Emma is currently down due to a Google Cloud outage affecting services in London since 7am,” the company said.
Revolut reported problems with several services, with some customers unable to open the app, transfer money or make card payments. More than 1,458 reports of disruption had been recorded by 8.02am, including complaints about the app, funds transfers and mobile banking.
Revolut said its customers’ money and data were safe.
“We are currently experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services,” the company said. “We’ve been working to fix the issue since it was identified this morning and apologise to anyone affected and for any inconvenience caused.”
Court hearings disrupted
The effects extended beyond commercial websites and financial services. The Criminal Bar Association said the outage had hampered barristers’ efforts to deal with court backlogs.
“Cloud Video Platform (CVP) is down across large parts of England and Wales since 10am,” the association said in a post on X.
“Many of us today, both as prosecution and defence counsel, can not proceed with trials and other hearings. Our work to clear backlogs is hampered.”
HM Courts and Tribunals Service said it was aware of an issue affecting the Cloud Video Platform, which is used for some remote hearings.
The outage also affected NHS England, according to the disruption reports.
Google Cloud provides data management, storage and networking for companies through large data centres. When a major provider experiences a fault, problems can spread across services that rely on the same infrastructure.
Marijus Briedis, chief technology officer at NordVPN, said the incident showed how dependent everyday services were on cloud infrastructure.
“When a cloud outage leaves people unable to make payments or access everyday services, it exposes how much we depend on infrastructure we never see,” he said.
Mr Briedis added that Google’s cloud services were used by businesses whose customers might not realise they depended on the company.
The incident is the latest in a series of major cloud service disruptions. Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services both experienced significant outages last year, affecting services across the internet.
