One Power Fault in London Froze Revolut, Banks and the NHS: Why Britain’s Cloud Bet Worries Regulators

On the morning of Tuesday, October 20, 2026, millions of people across Britain hit the same invisible wall. Card payments declined at checkouts, banking apps refused to load, parcels could not be tracked, and even the NHS app stumbled. The cause was not a cyberattack and not a software bug. It was a single power event inside one zone of Google Cloud’s London data centres. The fallout showed how much of daily life in Britain now runs through a handful of the same servers.

What happened on Tuesday morning

Google’s Cloud Service Health dashboard logged the incident at about 07:08 British Summer Time. The fault sat in europe-west2-b, one of three availability zones that make up Google’s London cloud region. A zone is meant to be an isolated data centre location, so a failure in one should not cascade into the others.

According to Google’s status page, a “power event” knocked the zone offline. Affected services included Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run, App Engine, Cloud Filestore, BigQuery Data Transfer Service, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes and the managed Kafka service. Google’s message was brief: the event had been mitigated and services were recovering, with priority given to existing workloads.

Most customers saw normal service return by about 15:03 BST, roughly eight hours after the first reports. Google told The Register it had no further detail beyond the status page, and said it will publish a full analysis once its internal investigation is complete.

Who felt it

Revolut was the most visible casualty. The London-headquartered digital bank said the outage disrupted multiple services, with card payments and ATM withdrawals among those affected, while stressing that customer money and data remained safe.

The disruption spread well beyond one fintech. Downdetector showed UK problem reports touching Lloyds Bank, HSBC, property site Rightmove, parcel service DPD, NHS England and Royal Mail. Court live streams were also affected, briefly taking part of the justice system offline. As one observer put it, a single power event disrupted banks, a property portal, a delivery network, the NHS app and the courts on the same morning.

These services look unrelated to the public. Underneath, many rent infrastructure from the same providers, so when one stumbles, the effects spread fast.

Why regulators are watching

The Financial Conduct Authority moved quickly. A spokesperson said: “We are aware of an incident affecting services provided by Google and are engaging with them and affected firms to understand the impact.” Measured language, real interest.

The incident landed three months after the UK took a major step on exactly this risk. In July, British regulators brought Google Cloud, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Oracle under direct oversight as critical third-party suppliers to the financial sector. The reasoning was plain: an outage at a major provider could hit many firms at once, making the provider itself a systemic risk. European regulators went a similar way last year, designating Google Cloud among 19 technology companies as critical third-party computing providers for the bloc’s finance industry.

Reuters said the outage spotlighted worries among UK and EU regulators about finance’s growing dependence on a few external technology firms. The October 20 event is now the live case study those rules were written for.

A design that is supposed to prevent this

Cloud architects will recognise an uncomfortable detail. Availability zones exist so a single building’s failure does not become a regional outage. If a power event in one zone can still freeze payments, banking and public services across a morning, customers and regulators will both want to know why the isolation did not hold.

That question also points at the customers. A company that runs critical services entirely inside one zone of one provider accepts a concentration risk, whether or not it has spelled that out to its users. Industry coverage of the incident has suggested Revolut is planning a multi-cloud setup, reportedly involving AWS, by 2027. That would spread the risk instead of betting everything on one provider. but resilience is designed in advance, not improvised during an outage.

What it means for everyone else

For ordinary users, the lesson is practical rather than technical. When payments fail and nobody can explain why, the first instinct is to blame the bank, the phone or the card. On October 20, the fault was several layers below any of those, in a building most customers will never see. Knowing that shared infrastructure sits behind so many everyday services explains why outages like this arrive in clusters and clear up together.

There is a quieter point about public services too. When NHS England and the court system land on the same casualty list as a property website, it underlines how far government services have moved into commercial cloud. That is an efficiency win in normal times. It also means the resilience of the state increasingly depends on the resilience of a few American companies.

Google will publish its post-incident report, and the FCA and affected firms will keep digging into the impact. The deeper question, how much of Britain’s daily life should rest on a single zone of a single cloud, will not be answered by one report. Expect it to come up again the next time a power event, or something worse, tests the same design.

Frequently Asked Questions

What caused the Google Cloud outage in London on October 20, 2026?

Google attributed the disruption to a “power event” in the europe-west2-b availability zone, one of three zones in its London cloud region. The incident began at about 07:08 BST and most services recovered by about 15:03 BST. Google says it will publish a full analysis once its internal investigation finishes, and has not explained what failed inside the zone’s power systems.

Which services were affected by the outage?

Revolut reported disrupted card payments and ATM withdrawals, while reports also touched Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Rightmove, DPD, NHS England, Royal Mail and court live streams. Google listed Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run, App Engine, Cloud Filestore and BigQuery Data Transfer among the affected services. Revolut said customer money and data remained safe.

Why are UK regulators concerned about cloud outages?

In July, the UK placed Google Cloud, Microsoft, AWS and Oracle under direct oversight as critical third-party suppliers to the financial sector, because an outage at one provider can hit many firms at once. The FCA said it was engaging with Google and affected firms after the October 20 incident. EU regulators took a similar step last year, designating 19 technology companies, including Google Cloud, as critical providers for the bloc’s finance industry.