At 06:08 GMT on Tuesday, a sudden power failure at Google Cloud’s London data centre knocked out services across the europe-west2 region, leaving banks like Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC unable to process withdrawals, transfers and card top‑ups for roughly six hours.
The outage stopped ATM cash withdrawals for Revolut customers, froze online transfers and halted the ability to add money to debit cards, sparking a flood of complaints from users who had tried to access their accounts.
Lloyds said in a statement that the root cause had been resolved and all services would return to normal soon, while HSBC warned customers that access to its online banking would remain unstable for the remainder of the day. Revolut’s spokesperson apologized, assuring that all customer money and data were safe.
The ripple effect reached beyond banking; property portal Rightmove, parcel courier DPD and Royal Mail all logged outages, and DownDetector recorded hundreds of reports of disrupted services across the UK.
Google confirmed that the fault was a power event, and that it had restored full functionality by 12:10 GMT, and pledged to publish a full incident report in the coming days. The incident has reignited fears over the UK’s heavy dependence on the three hyperscalers, with cybersecurity professor Alan Woodward warning that the AI boom only heightens the vulnerability.