Revolut and Major UK Banks Hit by Google Cloud Outage
Millions of Revolut customers and users across the UK and Europe faced widespread service disruptions after a power event knocked out core infrastructure at a Google Cloud data centre in London. The technical failure, which began early on Tuesday morning, impacted card payments, cash withdrawals, account sign-ins, and money transfers for major fintech platforms and high street banks.
Google Cloud Power Event Triggers Regional Disruption
The outage stemmed from a power event within the europe-west2-b zone at a London data centre, causing intermittent network failures and knocking multiple services offline, according to Google’s Service Health updates. The technical incident hit operations in the region late Monday and continued into Tuesday morning. Google reported that its engineering team mitigated the power event and began restoring workloads by early afternoon, prioritizing the recovery of existing services.
We are currently experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services. We can confirm that all our customers’ money and data are safe. We’ve been working to fix the issue since it was identified this morning and apologise to anyone affected and for any inconvenience…
Revolut and High Street Banks Confirm Service Failures
Revolut confirmed the service disruption across multiple markets, including Ireland—where the digital bank serves 3.4 million customers—as well as the UK and Spain. According to outage tracking platform Downdetector, reports spiked between 7:00 AM and 8:00 AM, with users encountering rejected card payments at supermarkets, petrol stations, and cafes. Revolut issued a formal statement assuring users that all customer funds and personal data remained safe while engineering teams worked on a backend resolution. High street lenders Lloyds Bank and HSBC also experienced customer login difficulties and disruptions to online services, while the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority confirmed it was in contact with Google to monitor the situation.
Legal Proceedings and Public Services Stalled
The cloud failure extended beyond retail banking, disrupting critical legal proceedings across England and Wales. The video platform utilized by defendants, lawyers, and other parties to attend remote court hearings failed to function throughout Tuesday morning, leading to delays in several cases involving defendants held in custody. Additional platforms, including property portal Rightmove, satirical news site NewsThump, and delivery operations for Royal Mail and DPD, also reported technical disruptions linked to the Google Cloud incident.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Outage
Were customer funds or personal data compromised during the Revolut outage?
Revolut confirmed that all customer money and data remained completely safe and unaffected by the infrastructure failure. The incident was strictly limited to a technical service disruption caused by power issues at a third-party cloud provider.
Which financial institutions and services were affected in the UK and Ireland?
In addition to Revolut, users reported difficulties accessing services at Lloyds Bank, Halifax, and HSBC. While AIB and Bank of Ireland reported normal operations, delivery networks like DPD and the remote video platform for UK courts also suffered disruptions.
When did services begin to return to normal?
Google reported that engineers mitigated the power event at the London data centre and began seeing the recovery of services by 1:00 PM London time on Tuesday, prioritizing the restoration of existing workloads.
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