Revolut and other companies hit by Google Cloud outage

A major outage in Google Cloud services has left numerous companies unable to operate for hours, including the digital bank Revolut, several banks, and logistics firms such as DPD. According to Google, the disruptions were caused by issues with the power supply. The affected services include several within Google’s Cloud region europe-west2 in London, particularly zone europe-west2-b, one of three availability zones in the region. The outages primarily impacted British companies, though German users of Revolut have also been affected. According to Google’s Cloud service status dashboard, many services in the London region have been non-operational since early Tuesday morning, around 8 a.m. CET. Google stated that “multiple Google Cloud services are experiencing increased errors and intermittent network failures” in the europe-west2 region. Affected services include BigQuery Data Transfer Service, Cloud Filestore, Cloud Run, Google App Engine, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Managed Service for Apache Kafka. As reported by The Register, Revolut, officially using Google Cloud services, is among the affected entities, along with companies such as Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Royal Mail, Rightmove, DPD, British Telecom (BT), and Screwfix. A representative from ING confirmed that the recent outage at the bank was unrelated to the Google Cloud disruption. The cause of the outage, according to Google, was a problem with the power supply. This issue has since been resolved, and infrastructure services are gradually resuming. Google noted that “the remaining services will be restored afterward.” In the latest update, Google reported that services are recovering, and existing workloads should be fully operational by 3 p.m. CET. However, new workloads might still not be able to be created. As a workaround, Google recommends that customers attempt to move affected workloads to another available location (zone or region). Additionally, Google’s cloud-native security platform, Google SecOps (SIEM and SOAR), was also affected. According to Google’s security product status page, the disruption was resolved at 1:50 p.m. CET. Cloudflare reportedly was not affected, and this information has been updated accordingly. Millions of customers of digital banks in Germany were unable to access their accounts for hours on Tuesday. According to ING, the technical issues causing the login problems in internet banking and the banking app occurred from early morning until noon. The company said that all services are now back to normal. “We regret the limitations for our customers and apologize for the inconvenience caused,” a spokesperson said. The ING outage was due to internal problems and not a cyberattack. “There are no indications of an external cause or connection with external services,” the spokesperson explained. Revolut has more than 80 million global customers, including over three million in Germany. The company confirmed that the service disruption was linked to the Google Cloud failure. “We confirm that all our customers' money and data are safe,” a spokesperson said. The company has been working to resolve the issue since it was detected and apologized to affected users. In the United Kingdom, a power outage at a Google Cloud data center near London led to serious disruptions in financial services. Google stated that the incident began at 6:08 a.m. GMT on Tuesday. “Multiple Google Cloud services are experiencing elevated errors and intermittent network failures in the europe-west2 region,” Google said in an earlier update, referring to its London data center. Internet service tracker Downdetector recorded hundreds of reports of problems affecting other businesses, including the property website Rightmove and the Royal Mail postal service. Lloyds confirmed that some customers were having issues with their app and online banking. HSBC confirmed that customers were experiencing difficulties accessing their services and said they would monitor the situation, which is also affecting other organizations. A Revolut spokesperson said the bank was “working to fix the issue since it was identified” and offered its apologies “to anyone affected and for any inconvenience caused.” The incident has once again highlighted the high dependence of financial institutions and public services on external cloud infrastructure providers. The UK’s financial regulator, FCA, confirmed that it is in contact with Google to obtain more information about the incident. The episode has reignited concerns about the reliance of institutions and companies on cloud services from a few US technology groups. The issue is becoming even more pronounced with the rise of artificial intelligence, as experts point out.