Google Cloud London outage disrupts Revolut, UK banks and services across Europe

What happened

Google reported elevated error rates and intermittent network outages affecting several Google Cloud services in the europe-west2 region, where its London data centre is located. According to Google's service status page, the incident began at 6:08 GMT on Tuesday, 20 October 2026. Google said its technical team was still investigating, gave no cause for the problem, and reported no temporary workaround for affected users at the time.

Banks and apps hit

Revolut, the British digital bank, confirmed on X that it was experiencing a disruption affecting several of its services, including app access, card payments, transfers and withdrawals. The bank said it had been working on the problem since it was identified that morning, and it apologised to those affected. Revolut said the money and data of all its customers were safe. A source cited by Reuters linked the banking outage to the Google Cloud incident, and Italian and Portuguese outlets repeated that link.

In the UK, Lloyds told the BBC its app was working normally but acknowledged that some customers had problems with certain online services that morning. Halifax said on X that it knew some customers were having trouble with its app and website. Royal Mail and DPD also reported problems, according to Downdetector and UK press reports. Berliner Zeitung, citing those affected, also named ING among the financial services hit.

Spread beyond the UK

Downdetector showed hundreds of reports concerning Lloyds and HSBC, the property site Rightmove and Royal Mail. In Italy, reports on Downdetector concerned mainly server connections, APIs and virtual machines. Observador verified that the Revolut app was failing for users in Portugal, where it either did not load or displayed the error message "Ocorreu um erro. Tente novamente mais tarde". Berliner Zeitung and dpa reported effects for users in several European countries beyond Britain.

A Google spokesperson told Observador that the company was investigating the situation in more detail and pointed to its service status page for updates. Google had said it would provide a further update with the latest details at 13:00 Italian time.

Open questions

The cause of the failure had not been disclosed in the reports. Reports also did not establish the full extent of the international impact, and it was not yet clear how long the disruption would last or when services would return to normal. Revolut said it was still working to restore full operations, while Google said the impact on services depended on which of its services each customer used.