Google Says Power Event Disrupting London Cloud Services Is Mitigated
Google says services are recovering after a power problem in its London cloud zone hit banks, Revolut and court video systems
By AXY Business Desk ·
Key points
- Google said a power event that caused an outage in its europe-west2-b zone in London had been mitigated, and services were being restored.
- Customers might not yet be able to create new workloads, while recovery of existing workloads was tentatively expected by 06:00 on Tuesday 20 October, Pacific time.
- Banks, the fintech company Revolut and court video systems were reported among those affected by the disruption.
- Law firm Gordons said some companies could lose sales and might struggle to obtain significant compensation.
- Google said it would provide an update by 06:00 PDT, which is 2pm in London.
Google says a power event that knocked out parts of its Cloud computing services in London has been mitigated, and that services are now being restored after widespread disruption across the UK. The company apologised for the outage, which affected customers including banks, the digital bank Revolut and court video systems, according to reporting on the incident.
In a statement posted to its Service Health page, Google said it was seeing signs of recovery. The company stated that a power event had caused an outage within its europe-west2-b zone, which is one of the physical data-centre locations that make up its London cloud region. Google said the power event had been mitigated and that it was restoring services and prioritising the recovery of existing workloads. Workloads are the applications, websites and data processes that companies run on cloud infrastructure.
Google also warned that customers might not yet be able to create new workloads. In other words, the company was focused first on getting already running systems back online before reopening the ability to launch new ones. It said full recovery of existing workloads should be completed, tentatively, by 06:00 on Tuesday 20 October, Pacific time. Google said it would provide a further update by 06:00 PDT, which is 2pm in London, with what it called current details of the situation.
What Google Has Said About the Outage
The statement is a short operational notice rather than a full post-incident analysis. It confirms the root cause as a power event and describes the affected area as a single zone within the London region. It does not, in the material available, set out how long the disruption lasted for each customer, how many organisations were affected, or what specific equipment failed. Those details are typically published later in a post-incident report, and readers should treat the current timetable as provisional, since Google itself described the full recovery date as tentative.
Google's apology is significant because it signals the company accepts that the disruption was serious enough to warrant public regret, rather than simply describing the event as a technical fault. Companies that run critical services on cloud platforms closely watch these statements, because they often form the basis for later contract discussions about service credits and compensation.
Impact on Banks, Fintech and Public Services
The reported impact spread across several sectors. Banks were among the organisations affected, which matters because customers depend on online banking and payment systems every day. When a cloud provider has a regional problem, banks may see delays in apps, login failures or slower transactions, depending on how their systems are built and where they host their workloads. Revolut, a financial technology company headquartered in London that offers app-based banking and payments, was also named as affected in reporting on the outage.
Court video cameras were also reported to have been hit. Many courts and public bodies have moved some video, recording and hearing systems onto third-party cloud platforms, which can reduce the cost of maintaining local hardware but also means a single regional failure can reach public services. The material does not specify which courts were affected or for how long, so it is not possible to measure the disruption to specific hearings from the information available.
For ordinary users, the most visible effects of a cloud outage are typically app failures, websites that will not load, delayed payments and error messages. Where a provider's services are used behind the scenes by many different companies, a single outage can affect a broad range of everyday services at once, even for customers who never directly chose that provider.
Business Exposure and Compensation
Beyond the immediate technical problems, the outage raises commercial questions. Ryan Gracey, a partner at the law firm Gordons, has suggested that the Google Cloud outage could result in some companies losing sales, and that those businesses might struggle to obtain much compensation. His comments reflect a common concern among businesses that rely on cloud providers: contracts usually limit the liability of the provider and often offer service credits, which are discounts on future fees, rather than full reimbursement for lost revenue.
In practice, the value of any claim depends on the terms in each customer's contract, the service level agreement that governs uptime, and whether the outage is judged to fall within the provider's commitments. Service level agreements typically define how availability is measured and what remedies apply if it falls short. Businesses that lost sales during the outage may therefore find that their recoverable amount is limited, even when the disruption was real and costly.
This is why cloud outages often prompt renewed discussion about resilience. Some companies spread workloads across multiple regions or providers so that a failure in one place does not stop their entire operation. Others accept the risk because multi-region setups are more expensive and complex to run. The tradeoff between cost and resilience is one that boards and technology leaders must weigh, and an incident like this can shift that calculation.
How Cloud Regions and Zones Work
For readers less familiar with cloud infrastructure, a region is a geographic area where a provider runs its data centres, and a zone is an isolated location within that region. The idea is that zones are separate enough that a problem in one should not take down the others. In this case, Google said the outage was within one zone, europe-west2-b, which suggests that the company's design was intended to contain the failure to a single area. However, the reported spread of problems to multiple UK organisations shows that dependence on a single region can still create wide consequences for customers who have not built redundancy elsewhere.
Power events are one of the more serious categories of data-centre failure. Data centres rely on mains electricity supplied through backup systems such as uninterruptible power supplies and generators. When those systems fail or cannot isolate a fault quickly enough, servers can lose power, which can interrupt running applications and make restoration more complicated. Google's statement that it is prioritising existing workloads reflects a common recovery sequence: restore the systems already serving customers first, then reopen the ability to launch new resources.
What to Watch Next
Several developments will determine how the incident is ultimately assessed. The first is the update Google said it would publish by 06:00 PDT, which should provide more detail on the status of the affected zone. The second is whether Google confirms full recovery of existing workloads by the tentative target time. The third is whether the company restores the ability for customers to create new workloads, which is a separate step and could take longer.
Analysts and legal specialists are likely to focus on the post-incident report, which would normally explain the cause of the power event, the duration of the disruption, and what changes Google plans to prevent a repeat. Customers may also review their contracts and consider whether they have grounds for service credits. Regulators and public bodies that rely on cloud services may ask questions about resilience, particularly where financial services and court systems were affected.
For now, the key facts are that Google says the power event has been mitigated, services are recovering, existing workloads are being prioritised, and new workloads may not yet be available. The full scale of the economic and operational impact has not been set out in the material available, and any assessment of lost sales or long-term damage will depend on the detail Google and affected customers publish in the coming days.
Questions and answers
What caused the Google Cloud outage in London?
Google said a power event caused the outage within its europe-west2-b zone, one of the zones in its London region. The company says the power event has now been mitigated.
Which services were affected by the Google Cloud outage?
Reporting said the disruption affected banks, the fintech company Revolut and court video systems in the UK. Google's statement focused on restoring existing workloads, and customers might not yet be able to create new ones.
When will Google Cloud services be fully restored?
Google said full recovery of existing workloads should be completed, tentatively, by 06:00 on Tuesday 20 October, Pacific time. It said it would provide a further update by 06:00 PDT, which is 2pm in London.
Can businesses get compensation for losses from the outage?
Ryan Gracey, a partner at law firm Gordons, said some companies could lose sales and might struggle to get much compensation. The amount recoverable generally depends on each customer's contract and service level terms.
Topics: Google Cloud, Cloud outage, London, Revolut, UK banks, Gordons, data centres
Sources: The Guardian Business