Google Cloud power failure in London knocks out UK banking apps and Revolut card payments for a morning

A power problem at Google Cloud's London region disrupted banking apps and online services across the UK on 20 October 2026. Google's service health dashboard reported elevated errors and intermittent network failures in europe-west2, the region that mainly serves customers in the UK and Ireland. Problems began at around 07:00 BST, and in an update at 12:12 BST Google attributed the outage to a power event. Reports said service was restored by around midday. Revolut was the most visibly affected. Its status page showed most services as unavailable or only partly available, including card payments and ATM withdrawals, and the company said customers' money and data remained safe. Customers of Lloyds, Halifax, Bank of Scotland, Barclays and HSBC also reported problems with apps and online banking, although not every bank confirmed a link to the Google incident. Royal Mail, DPD, Rightmove and NHS England services drew outage reports too. No figures have been published on how many payments failed or were delayed, and no UK regulator had commented on the incident at the time of reporting. In July 2026 the UK designated Google Cloud EMEA as one of four critical third-party suppliers to its financial sector, so the outage is likely to feature in the oversight that status brings. For online merchants the episode shows that a failure at one cloud region can break the payment side of checkout even when their own systems are healthy. When a shopper's bank or card issuer is down, card authorisations, in-app approvals for strong customer authentication and pay-by-bank journeys can all fail, and two large UK parcel carriers were affected at the same time. A morning of unexplained declines can easily be mistaken for a fraud spike or an integration fault.