Google Cloud Power Event Disrupts UK Banks and Court Hearings

Google said the failure affected its “europe-west2-b zone”. By 1pm London time, services were starting to come back online, according to the Guardian, but not before customers at Lloyds, HSBC and Revolut ran into problems with payments, transfers and access to accounts.

That sort of failure tends to expose an awkward distinction. The money is still yours; reaching it is another matter. Revolut said a “service disruption” had hit sign-up, sign-in, card payments, transfers, ATM withdrawals and cryptocurrency services, while insisting that customers’ funds and data were safe. Lloyds said its app was online and customers could log in normally, though some online services were affected. HSBC said some customers were having difficulties accessing services.

The disruption also reached well beyond banking. The video system used for remote court appearances across England and Wales failed throughout the morning, the Guardian reported, and several hearings were believed to have been delayed. For defendants in custody, lawyers and courts that now rely on those links, this is not some peripheral convenience dropping offline. It interrupts the machinery.

The Financial Conduct Authority said it was in touch with Google and seeking more information. That gives the outage a significance beyond a bad morning for app users and court staff. The UK has been sharpening its focus on the technology groups that provide critical cloud services to financial firms; an incident like this shows why. A single fault at a major provider can travel quickly into retail banking and public services, and do so in a way that looks, to the customer or defendant waiting on a screen, indistinguishable from institutional failure.

The Guardian also reported that Rightmove was affected, while Royal Mail and DPD were said to have suffered disruption. The public statements do not fully map every link in that chain. They do not need to, really, to show the scale of the dependency. One power event at one London cloud operation was enough to stall payments, access to cash and parts of the court system in the same morning.