Google Cloud Outage Disrupts Major Internet Services Worldwide

A major Google Cloud outage has disrupted hundreds of websites and apps, affecting businesses and essential services across the UK.

Banking apps, Royal Mail and property website Rightmove are among the services reporting problems after the disruption began at around 7am BST.

Google said its London region has been affected.

The technology giant said engineers were investigating the incident, which affected the London-based europe-west2 data centre.

In an update posted to its Cloud Status page at 12:12 BST, Google said: “We are experiencing an issue with multiple services in europe-west2 beginning on Monday, 2026-10-19 23:08 PDT.”

The company added: “Due to a power event, we suffered an outage within the europe-west2-b zone. The power event is mitigated.”

It said partial recovery of infrastructure services would be seen within 30 minutes, with the remaining services expected to be restored afterwards.

Google said it would provide another update by Tuesday, 2026-10-20 05:00 PDT, adding: “We apologise to all who are affected by the disruption.”

Down Detector, which monitors online service outages, reported issues affecting Rightmove, Halifax, Lloyds Bank, Revolut, HSBC and Royal Mail.

The disruption also spread to vital public services, including NHS England and the courts.

The Criminal Bar Association (CBA) said the outage had “hampered” barristers’ efforts to reduce court backlogs.

In a post on X, the CBA said: “Cloud Video Platform (CVP) is down across large parts of England and Wales since 10am.”

It added: “Many of us today, both as prosecution and defence counsel, cannot proceed with trials and other hearings. Our work to clear backlogs is hampered.”

HM Courts and Tribunals Service also acknowledged the problem, writing on X: “We’re aware of an issue affecting Cloud Video Platform (CVP), used for some remote hearings.”

The judge overseeing the Russell Brand trial, Mr Justice Bennathan, chose to continue proceedings despite several people being unable to join remotely.

Some people who had planned to watch online were able to take spare seats in the courtroom. However, many others could not follow the trial as the fourth complainant began giving evidence.

A large number of banking apps were also affected, leaving some customers unable to send or receive payments.

By 9.00am, Down Detector showed 480 user-submitted reports of disruption affecting the Lloyds Bank app and website.

Of those affected customers, 36 per cent said they were unable to log in, 31 per cent said they could not use online banking, while a further 25 per cent said they could not use the app. 

Halifax Bank wrote on X that the company was ‘aware some customers are having issues with our app and online.’

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Likewise, the budgeting app Emma took to social media to confirm that the outage was ‘not a security issue’.

The company wrote: ‘Emma is currently down due to a Google Cloud outage affecting services in London since 7am.’

The banking app Revolut also appeared to be partially affected, with customers worldwide unable to open the app, send money, or even make card payments.

On X, one frustrated commenter complained: This morning: Can’t buy breakfast. Car is stuck in a paid carpark. Can’t pay for taxi or scooter as backup. Probably should be carrying some cash.’ 

‘Nothing like being stuck in the middle of a city in Japan, unable to pay for literally anything and having to cancel my beauty appointments because my bank @Revolut is having a massive outage,’ wrote another.

While one customer said: ‘I’m at a petrol station in Australia. Can’t pay for my fuel that I just put in my car.. so I’m just standing in the petrol station highly embarrassed and can’t get home to my kids.’

According to Down Detector, issues began around 8.00am this morning and quickly escalated as users shared hundreds of outage reports.

By 8.02am, Revolut had over 1,458 reports of service disruption.

Of those, 62 per cent of customers said they were having problems with the app, 22 per cent with funds transfer, and nine per cent with mobile banking.

In a post shared on X earlier today, Revolut says: ‘We are currently experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services. We can confirm that all our customers’ money and data are safe. 

‘We’ve been working to fix the issue since it was identified this morning and apologise to anyone affected and for any inconvenience caused.’

Marijus Briedis, Chief Technology Officer at NordVPN, told the Daily Mail: ‘When a cloud outage leaves people unable to make payments or access everyday services, it exposes how much we depend on infrastructure we never see.

‘For everyday Google users, this dependence can mean several services they rely on suddenly being unavailable at the same time. Someone unable to pay through one banking app may find their alternative is affected too.’ 

Mr Briedis adds that the enormous scope of Google’s cloud computing services means that outages might affect businesses whose customers have no idea they depend on the company at all.

Cloud computing is where companies pay providers like Google and Amazon to handle their data management, storage, and networking at large data centres.

These services are typically far cheaper for companies than managing their own servers, and typically extremely reliable.

However, when a major provider does experience a problem, it can have cascading effects due to the number of companies affected.

This outage is the latest in a string of serious service disruptions that have affected cloud services over the last few years. 

Last year, both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services saw major outages that brought ‘half the internet’ to a standstill.

Together, Amazon and Microsoft’s vast data centres, known as ‘hyperscalers’, host over 60 per cent of the world’s cloud services.

So when there is a problem, almost everyone around the world feels the impact.