Google says Cloud services in its London region "are experiencing issues", starting Monday at 23:08 PDT; Revolut says its major outage is due to Google Cloud

A single power event at Google Cloud's London region caused widespread disruption and outage for many services, impacting customers globally. Customers may need to reconsider their multi-region deployment strategies or consider alternative cloud providers. The incident also highlights the cascading effect of infrastructure failures on downstream services and the importance of robust disaster recovery plans. Businesses that rely on Google Cloud's London region for critical operations faced significant downtime. The incident underscores the potential risks associated with single-region dependencies for high-availability applications. Customers may need to evaluate their cloud architecture and contingency plans to mitigate the impact of future such events.

Google Cloud services in its London (europe-west2) region experienced a widespread outage starting Monday, October 19, 2026, at 23:08 PDT, caused by a power event in the europe-west2-b zone. The incident affected numerous services including AlloyDB for PostgreSQL, Apigee, BigQuery, Cloud Filestore, Cloud Firestore, Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud Spanner, Google Compute Engine, and Google Kubernetes Engine, among others. Customers reported issues, with Revolut confirming its major service outage was due to this Google Cloud incident. Google engineers worked to mitigate the power event and restore services, prioritizing existing workloads over new ones. Partial mitigation of infrastructure services was observed within 30 minutes of the power event mitigation. By Tuesday, October 20, 2026, at 05:10 PDT, most services in the affected region were recovering, with full recovery of existing workloads tentatively expected by 06:00 PDT.

The extensive service disruption across Google Cloud's London region, triggered by a localized power event, demonstrates the inherent fragility of even large-scale cloud infrastructure. The outage affected a broad spectrum of services, from databases and storage to compute and networking, indicating a deep-seated issue within the zone's power infrastructure that cascaded across multiple layers of their platform. This event serves as a stark reminder for businesses that while cloud providers offer immense scalability and flexibility, they are not immune to physical infrastructure failures, underscoring the importance of understanding and planning for regional-level disruptions.

For companies like Revolut, which publicly attributed its own outage to the Google Cloud incident, the event highlights the critical dependencies that modern digital services have on their underlying cloud providers. It suggests that while service providers can offer a wide array of services, the reliability of those services is ultimately tethered to the stability of the cloud infrastructure. This situation may prompt a re-evaluation of risk management strategies, pushing more organizations to adopt more sophisticated multi-cloud or hybrid cloud architectures to ensure business continuity, or at least to diversify their critical workloads across different providers or geographically distinct regions.