Google Cloud has said a "power event" was responsible for an outage that disrupted a range of services in the UK, in what operators and users reported as widespread interruptions to banking and internet services.
The outage has been linked to several online platforms and financial services, most notably Revolut, which experienced partial or complete service loss for customers on Tuesday morning. Users reported being unable to access accounts and carry out transactions during the disruption.
Impact
Because many firms host critical systems on public cloud infrastructure, problems at a major cloud provider can cascade across sectors. In this case, banks and consumer-facing websites that rely on Google Cloud's services reported degraded performance or temporary outages, prompting customer complaints and operational disruption for affected businesses.
Context and implications
Google Cloud's attribution of the incident to a "power event" highlights the vulnerabilities of centralised infrastructure to single-point incidents. Outages of this kind typically prompt clients and regulators to scrutinise resilience measures, contingency arrangements and redundancy strategies to reduce the risk of future disruption.
Companies affected by the outage moved to restore normal operations and to communicate with customers, while the incident underlined the dependence of modern financial and web services on a small number of large cloud providers. Further technical details and post-incident updates were expected as providers and customers completed their assessments.