Google Cloud recovers from London power failure that disrupted banking and delivery apps

A power failure in Google Cloud's London data center knocked dozens of online services offline across Western Europe on Tuesday morning. The disruption began at 0608 UTC in the europe-west2-b availability zone, leaving major digital tools inaccessible and triggering a wave of downstream service failures for clients including Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Revolut, Royal Mail, and Rightmove. [1][2]

Google stated that the underlying power event was mitigated and prioritized restoring existing customer workloads, though it warned that users could not immediately deploy new ones. Essential cloud components went offline during the incident, including BigQuery Data Transfer Service, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run, Cloud Filestore, and App Engine. While services in the wider region faced elevated error rates and network instability, Google advised customers to migrate critical tasks to alternative zones or regions where possible. [1][2]

Industry observers pointed to the disruption as a warning about the hidden vulnerabilities of shared internet infrastructure. Marijus Briedis, chief technology officer at NordVPN, noted that the incident revealed how tightly bound separate businesses like banks and delivery firms are to a handful of core tech providers. Computer science lecturer Dr. Amro Al-Said Ahmad emphasized to The Register that true digital resilience requires multi-region redundancy rather than relying solely on a single cloud data center. [1][2]