Google Cloud outage in London knocks Revolut, banking apps offline

A Google Cloud outage in the company's London region knocked banking apps and other online services offline for several hours on Tuesday, 20 October 2026. Google said on its service health page that a "power event" in one zone of its europe-west2 region caused the failure, that the problem had been mitigated, and that services were recovering. Revolut, the digital bank, was the most visible casualty: customers could not reliably sign in, make card payments, send transfers or withdraw cash from ATMs.

Cloud computing means renting computing power, storage and software from a large provider instead of running your own data centre. The big three providers, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, divide their networks into "regions" (a city or area) and "zones" (separate buildings or halls inside a region, each with its own power and cooling). The idea is that if one zone fails, applications move to another zone in the same region and users notice nothing.

Tuesday's outage shows the limit of that design. A single power problem in one zone was enough to disrupt a major digital bank, which suggests that at least some critical systems were not spread widely enough across zones, or that the failover (the automatic switch to a backup) did not work as planned. Engineers at the affected companies will want to know which of the two it was.

The episode also feeds a long-running debate in Europe and elsewhere about "concentration risk": the danger that too many banks, payment firms and public services depend on the same few cloud companies. When one of them has a bad morning, the effect spreads across sectors at once, from banking to parcel delivery. Outages like this one are the cases that such planning is meant to cover.

For India, the lesson is direct. Indian banks, fintech apps, e-commerce platforms and government digital services increasingly run on the same global cloud providers. The questions UK customers and regulators are now asking, about backup zones, backup regions and how quickly a service can move, apply equally to Indian companies that keep their most important systems in one location.

Short-term: Customers of Revolut and other affected services faced failed payments, blocked log-ins and delayed transfers during the working day in the UK and parts of Europe. Businesses that host websites and apps in the London region lost hours of service and will be checking whether any data or transactions need to be re-run.

Long-term: Expect closer questions from banking regulators about how firms protect critical services against a single cloud zone or region going down, and more pressure on cloud providers to publish clear explanations of what went wrong. Some companies may move to spread their systems across more locations or more than one provider, which costs more but cuts the risk.

Who is affected: Users of Revolut and other apps hosted in Google Cloud's London region, the businesses that rent capacity there, and technology teams around the world, including in India, who design systems on public cloud platforms.

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