Google Cloud Outage Disrupts UK Banks and Courts
A power fault at Google's London data center knocked Lloyds, HSBC, and Revolut offline and stalled court proceedings across the UK.
A power failure at a Google Cloud facility in London triggered widespread disruption across the United Kingdom on Tuesday, leaving millions of bank customers unable to make payments or transfer funds and forcing court hearings to a standstill.
Google attributed the incident to a "power event" affecting its europe-west2-b zone, one of the company's UK-based cloud computing regions. The outage rippled through financial institutions including Lloyds, HSBC, and Revolut, all of which rely on cloud infrastructure to process customer transactions.
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Beyond the banking sector, the disruption reached Britain's court system, where technology-dependent hearings were stalled as a result. The simultaneous impact on both financial services and public institutions underscores the degree to which critical national infrastructure has become dependent on a small number of large cloud providers.
Google said services were restored for most affected users, though the episode renews longstanding questions among regulators and technology analysts about concentration risk — the vulnerability created when a single provider underpins multiple sectors simultaneously. UK financial regulators have in recent years pressed banks to demonstrate resilience against exactly this kind of third-party outage.
Continue reading at Business | The Guardian.
