Google Cloud is experiencing a major incident in its europe-west2 (London) region that has produced elevated errors and intermittent network failures across more than 38 cloud services, Google says. The disruption, traced to the europe-west2-b zone and linked by Google posts to a power event, has knocked offline banking apps and infrastructure for Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC and affected services used by Royal Mail, NHS England and public bike rental schemes. Engineers are investigating and testing mitigations such as moving impacted workloads to other regions, but Google has not published a recovery time and says there are currently no universal workarounds. Keele University lecturer Dr Amro Al-Said Ahmad warned the outage shows how a single regional failure can cascade through applications, APIs, payment platforms and third-party SaaS that depend on that region. Cloud monitoring data showed a sharp rise in connection failures from about 06:00 UTC on October 20, and some affected organisations have reported knock-on problems beyond the UK, including Revolut reporting issues in Singapore. The incident underscores calls for multi-region deployments, workload portability and tested disaster recovery to limit single-region failure impact.
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