A power event disrupted services in Google Cloud’s London region, affecting major banks and retailers while engineers work to restore systems.
Key points
- Outage began at 0608 UTC in the europe-west2-b zone
- Recovery was tentatively scheduled for 1300 UTC
- Affected services included BigQuery, Cloud Run, and Kubernetes Engine
Google Cloud services in its London region recovered from a multi-hour outage on Tuesday. The disruption, caused by a power event, affected digital banks and other major European services.
What happened
The incident began at 0608 UTC when the europe-west2-b availability zone in Google Cloud’s London region experienced failures. According to The Register, this unplanned downtime impacted multiple online products for customers in Western Europe. Google Cloud stated on its status page that a power event caused the outage within that specific zone. The company reported that the power issue was mitigated and service recovery was underway.
By 1158 UTC, Google Cloud indicated that full recovery of workloads would be completed tentatively by 1300 UTC. Customers were advised to expect an update at that time regarding the status of their services. The outage affected several major brands, including Revolut, Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Royal Mail, and Rightmove, according to reports from Bloomberg and The Register.
Services that went offline included BigQuery Data Transfer Service, Cloud Filestore, Cloud Run, Google App Engine, and Google Kubernetes Engine. Google noted that customers might not be able to create new workloads during the recovery phase. The Register reported that engineers were prioritizing the recovery of existing workloads.
Why it matters
Cloud outages demonstrate the concentration of risk in centralized infrastructure. When a single availability zone fails, it can disrupt numerous unrelated services that depend on it. This highlights the dependency effect in modern cloud ecosystems, where core region failures extend beyond directly affected services. Organizations must understand that cloud providers are not immune to physical infrastructure failures, such as power events. Redundancy across multiple regions or zones is essential for maintaining service continuity during such incidents.
The fix
- Monitor the Google Cloud status page for official updates
- Check if your applications are running in the affected London zone
- Verify connectivity to critical services like Cloud Run and Kubernetes
- Contact your cloud provider’s support if services remain down after the estimated recovery time
Why it matters
Teams usually design systems with redundancy to handle single-zone failures. Check whether your architecture spans multiple availability zones or regions to mitigate localized outages. Ensure your monitoring alerts trigger when specific zones become unresponsive. Review your disaster recovery plans to confirm they account for cloud provider outages. Understand that power events can impact even major cloud infrastructure, requiring robust contingency strategies.
What to do and how to stay safe: Google Cloud
- Check the Google Cloud status dashboard to see if your region is affected
- Verify if your applications are hosted in the europe-west2-b zone
- Monitor your application logs for connection errors or timeouts
- Once the vendor provides an update, test your services for full functionality
Step-by-step guide: What is password policies and how they protect systems
General security guidance from the Crypt Weekly newsroom. It is not confirmed advice from the organisations named in this story.
Frequently asked questions
What caused the Google Cloud London outage?
Google Cloud attributed the outage to a power event in the europe-west2-b availability zone.
When was the outage expected to be resolved?
Google Cloud tentatively scheduled full recovery of workloads by 1300 UTC on Tuesday.
Which services were affected by the outage?
Affected services included BigQuery, Cloud Run, Google App Engine, and Google Kubernetes Engine.
