Google Cloud power failure in London disrupts Revolut and Lloyds for six hours

Alphabet's Google Cloud lost part of its London region for 6 hours and 10 minutes on Oct 20 after a power failure, disrupting apps and websites at Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC [1][2]. Google's preliminary incident report says a grid disruption hit the facility hosting one London zone at 06:53 local time, and control systems failed to start the backup diesel generators, so servers went offline when the batteries ran out [1]. Traffic shifted to the region's other zones then overloaded them, causing errors and delays until 13:10 [1].

At Revolut, which has about 13 million UK customers, logins, card payments and cash withdrawals were affected [2]. Revolut runs on Google Cloud infrastructure and told customers that card transactions made during the outage may take a few days to appear in balances [3]. Lloyds and HSBC customers were unable to pay or move money for a period [3].

Treasury Committee chair Dame Meg Hillier wrote to the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) on Oct 20 asking how they would use their powers over the incident [4]. Google Cloud was designated a critical third party to the UK financial sector in July, which obliges it to report serious outages to both regulators [2][4]. The FCA said it was engaging with Google, and the European Banking Authority said it had contacted Google [2]. HSBC reports third-quarter results on Oct 27 and Alphabet on Oct 28 [5][6].