Google Cloud Outage Hits UK Banks, Royal Mail — SkimNews
Get the Finance newsletter
Daily finance — markets, central banks, M&A, the prints that move money. Free.
- Google Cloud said a "power event" at a third-party facility in its europe-west2 London region caused the outage, which it resolved by Tuesday evening and pledged to publicly analyse on its service health dashboard.
- Revolut, Lloyds Bank and HSBC confirmed disruptions, with more than 1,500 user reports flagging Revolut problems after 08:00 BST; Halifax and Bank of Scotland were also hit.
- HM Courts and Tribunals Service said the video platform used for remote hearings was affected, while Royal Mail, DPD and Forest e-bike service were among popular platforms that flagged issues.
- Revolut customer Rachael Ellen told the BBC she could not pay for parking or view an incoming transaction, and the app's help bot showed no pending payments.
- The Veg Box Company owner Guy Baybutt said his family-run produce firm lost sales because the website went down and DPD parcel collections could not be booked for fresh, perishable goods.
- Prof Feng Li of Bayes Business School said the outage shows how deeply economies depend on a handful of cloud providers, exactly one year after an AWS outage knocked more than 1,000 sites offline.
Why it matters: The same brittleness hit UK digital infrastructure on the anniversary of last year's AWS outage — small businesses like The Veg Box Company absorbed real revenue and inventory loss, while millions of customers discovered mid-transaction that banking apps, parcel tracking and even court hearings share a single point of failure. Google has yet to disclose what triggered the power event.
Ask SkimNews
