Google Cloud Outage in Europe Disrupts Major Banks Including Revolut and HSBC
On October 20, Google confirmed a network failure affecting multiple Cloud services in its European regions, triggering widespread fallout: dozens of banks and online services that rely on Google Cloud went down. Monitoring data showed affected institutions including Revolut, Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Bank of Scotland, Royal Mail, Rightmove, DPD, and Screwfix, while Sky News reported collective outages across multiple online services.
Confirmed
- Google's Cloud status page confirmed that multiple services in the europe-west2 (London) region had been failing since 23:08 PDT on October 19, including AlloyDB for PostgreSQL, Apigee, BigQuery Data Transfer, and more (@neallathia)
- Google announced an outage in its Western Europe region, taking down or degrading dozens of websites and services that depend on its cloud (@basedjensen, reshared by @AIFlowML)
- Revolut's app and card features were affected, with cardholders temporarily unable to make payments (@markk)
- Some users of Lloyds, Revolut, Bank of Scotland, HSBC, and other banks experienced service unavailability (@tekbog)
Unconfirmed
- The root cause and recovery timeline were unclear at the time of posting (@markk said details remained unknown)
Why it matters
- @tekbog reassured users that Revolut funds were safe — this was clearly not a bank-targeted hack, but a cascading failure from a single point of failure in cloud infrastructure
- The incident once again exposed how heavily major financial institutions depend on a single cloud provider: one regional network outage can simultaneously disrupt multiple banks, postal, and retail services, far beyond the scope of any single company's incident
2026-10-20 ~ 2026-10-20 · 5 related posts
Primary sources
- Google Cloud london region outage hits dozens of services; Revolut and Lloyds among affected — neal_lathia ·
- Google Cloud western Europe outage knocks Revolut, HSBC and dozens of sites offline — basedjensen ·
- Revolut hit by major outage affecting app and cards, possibly tied to Google Cloud — mark_k ·
- [source] Google Cloud london region outage hits dozens of services; Revolut and Lloyds among affected — neal_lathia · 2026-10-20
- Google Cloud network failure in Europe disrupts multiple banks including Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC — AIFlow_ML · 2026-10-20
- [source] Google Cloud western Europe outage knocks Revolut, HSBC and dozens of sites offline — basedjensen · 2026-10-20
- Lloyds, HSBC, Revolut and other banks down as outage hits Google Cloud — tekbog · 2026-10-20
- [source] Revolut hit by major outage affecting app and cards, possibly tied to Google Cloud — mark_k · 2026-10-20