1,500+ Revolut Reports Mark UK Google Cloud Outage Peak

More than 1,500 reports of problems with Revolut were logged on an outage-tracking site shortly after 08:00 BST on Tuesday, as a Google Cloud disruption in London rippled across UK banks, delivery firms and the court system, according to the BBC. Google Cloud said by Tuesday evening that the issue had been fixed.

What caused the Google Cloud outage?

Google Cloud traced the disruption to a "power event" inside one of the smaller data centre zones that make up its europe-west2 region — the company's UK cloud site in London, the BBC reported. The region is broken into zones, and the affected one was identified as europe-west2-b. Earlier Tuesday morning, Google's own status dashboard had described the problem more broadly, saying cloud services were "experiencing elevated errors and intermittent network failures in europe-west2 region."

Google Cloud is one of a handful of companies — alongside Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure — whose infrastructure underpins a large share of consumer-facing apps and business systems. Those providers divide their global footprint into "regions" built from local data centres, so a fault inside a single zone can still cascade outward to any client whose services route through it.

Which UK banks and services were affected?

Revolut, Lloyds Bank and HSBC all confirmed disruption tied to the outage on Tuesday morning, the BBC reported. Banking customers described a range of problems, from being unable to access funds while abroad to struggling to complete a property purchase. Beyond banking, customers flagged issues with Royal Mail, delivery firm DPD and e-bike service Forest. HM Courts and Tribunals Service said it was aware of a problem affecting the video platform used for remote hearings.

A Revolut spokesperson said some of the company's services were disrupted as a result of the Google Cloud outage, according to the BBC.

How many people reported problems, and what did they experience?

The BBC cited more than 1,500 reports of issues with Revolut flagged to a platform outage monitor shortly after 08:00 BST — a count that came alongside what the outlet described as thousands of reports of problems raised by users online across the affected services more broadly.

One customer, Rachael Ellen, a 25-year-old Revolut user from Glasgow, told the BBC she was locked out of her money. "Today I was unable to pay for my parking at a shopping centre because my Revolut account wasn't working properly," she said. "This left me in a difficult situation as I had no way to access the money I needed at the time." Ellen also said the outage kept her from viewing an incoming transaction from a relative, with the app's help bot telling her there were no pending transfers. "It's frustrating not knowing where the payment is or when I'll receive it," she told the BBC.

How did Google resolve the outage, and what has the company said?

Google Cloud confirmed the fix in a statement to the BBC on Tuesday evening: "We have resolved a disruption to Google Cloud services at a third-party facility in our europe-west2 cloud region due to a power event. Services have been restored." The company apologized to those affected and thanked customers for their patience, according to the BBC.

Google Cloud said it would publish a fuller analysis of the incident on its service health dashboard, where it posts status updates for customers worldwide. The company has not yet detailed, in the material reviewed, how long the europe-west2-b zone was down or what triggered the power event itself beyond that description.

Is this part of a broader pattern with cloud outages?

The BBC's reporting does not draw a direct comparison to other recent cloud incidents, but the structure of the outage underscores a dynamic familiar from past disruptions at major providers: a fault inside a single data centre zone, rather than an entire region, was enough to disrupt services as varied as digital banking, parcel delivery and court video hearings simultaneously. That concentration is a function of how few companies — Google, Amazon and Microsoft chief among them — supply the back-end infrastructure that a large share of consumer apps and public-sector systems depend on.

For now, Google Cloud's public statement is limited to confirming the cause as a power event in one zone and stating that services have been restored. Customers monitoring for a formal post-incident report should watch the company's service health dashboard for the promised detailed analysis.

Artiglio is A coming-soon iPhone chief of staff for briefings and drafts. Not on the App Store yet.