Google Cloud has restored service after an outage at its London region, europe-west2, that disrupted banks, couriers and even UK courts on Tuesday morning. The company blames a “power event” at a third-party facility. What stands out is how small the trigger sounds next to the damage. Google later narrowed the problem to europe-west2-b, one of its smaller zones, yet customers felt it across a long list of everyday services.
Revolut, Lloyds Bank and HSBC all confirmed disruption, and Revolut users filed more than 1,500 problem reports shortly after 08:00 BST. Rachael Ellen from Glasgow could not pay for parking because her account failed, and the app’s help bot told her nothing was pending. Revolut says customer money and data stayed safe. Meanwhile, Royal Mail, DPD and the e-bike service Forest reported trouble, and the courts service said the video platform for remote hearings ran into an issue.
Small firms took a harder hit than the headlines suggest. Guy Baybutt, who works at The Veg Box Company in Preston, could not open his site to process orders or book parcels onto DPD’s system. Fresh produce does not wait, and he lost new sales on top of the delays. Larger companies can absorb that kind of loss, he said, but a family business cannot.
The timing adds weight. Exactly one year earlier, an outage at AWS’s largest cloud site knocked more than 1,000 sites offline for hours, banks included. Prof Feng Li of Bayes Business School called Tuesday a reminder that the economy leans on a handful of providers. Failures will happen, he said, so the real tests are how far they spread, how fast services return and whether customers have workable alternatives.
Google promises an analysis on its service health dashboard, and two questions deserve answers there. First, why did trouble in one zone reach so many services? Second, how many affected customers had spread their workloads across zones? Until then, any company running critical systems in a single region might test its failover before the next bad Tuesday.
