Google Cloud outage affects almost all banking and other operations in Europe

If you use Google Cloud services in Europe, your operations may have been disrupted for nearly eight hours.

A power event on October 19, 2026, at 23:08 PDT caused a widespread outage in Google Cloud's europe-west2 region, specifically affecting the europe-west2-b zone. The incident impacted a vast array of services, including AlloyDB for PostgreSQL, Apigee, BigQuery, Cloud Firestore, Compute Engine, and Kubernetes Engine, among many others. Users experienced service unavailability, elevated errors, and intermittent network issues, with no immediate workaround available. Google Cloud's engineering team began investigating and mitigating the issue, with partial recovery observed by 05:10 PDT on October 20, 2026. Full mitigation for most customers was achieved by 07:00 PDT, though a small number of users may have still been affected as of the final update. The incident officially concluded by 07:00 PDT, with Google promising a post-incident analysis.

This extensive outage underscores the critical reliance of European banking and other operations on a single cloud provider's infrastructure within a specific region. The broad impact across numerous core services highlights potential single points of failure in cloud architectures, especially when regional redundancies are not sufficiently architected or leveraged. The incident may prompt a re-evaluation of disaster recovery and business continuity plans by organizations heavily dependent on the europe-west2 region for their critical functions.

Moving forward, expect increased scrutiny on cloud provider resilience and a potential acceleration of multi-cloud or hybrid cloud strategies among large enterprises, particularly in finance. Businesses may also invest more in granular monitoring and automated failover mechanisms to mitigate the impact of future regional cloud disruptions. The incident could also fuel discussions around regulatory requirements for cloud service availability and redundancy in critical sectors.