‘Too big to not fail’: Google outage exposes UK reliance on a handful of cloud providers
Our dependence on internet services of a few key tech companies leaves us vulnerable to cloud failures, bugs and more, experts say It happened again. A power outage hit a datacentre in London , and things cascaded from there: multiple banking services faltered, court hearings were put on hold and patients reported temporary glitches on the NHS app. The datacentre in question was in Google’s…
On Tuesday, a power outage at a Google Cloud data centre near London disrupted services, causing significant failures across several digital platforms, according to the US technology giant. Several UK banks reported widespread disruptions stemming from the outage. Google's Cloud services experienced an outage due to a power event, with a full recovery expected around 1300 GMT on Tuesday.
The disruption affected digital bank Revolut, including ATM withdrawals, bank transfers, and bank card top-ups. Lloyds and HSBC confirmed that their customers faced issues with their banking services. The incident began at 0608 GMT on Tuesday, with multiple Google Cloud services in the europe-west2 region, located in London, experiencing elevated errors and intermittent network failures.
Internet service tracker Downdetector recorded hundreds of reports of problems affecting other businesses, including the property website Rightmove and the Royal Mail postal service. Lloyds and HSBC notified customers about difficulties accessing their online banking and app services, promising to monitor the situation, which also affected other organizations.
A Revolut spokesperson stated that the bank was working to fix the issue and assured its customers that their money and data remained safe, expressing apologies for any inconvenience caused.
Written by urgent.news from Euronews Business's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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- Power outage hits Google Cloud services disrupting UK banks euronews.com
- Google cloud failure hits millions as UK courts and banks knocked offline theguardian.com
- Google outage hitting EU, UK hard appleinsider.com
