Google Cloud says a 'power event' caused an outage in its London zone, taking down banks, a parcel firm and property sites, with recovery tentatively due by 1300 UTC.
Google Cloud has blamed a "power event" for taking down multiple online products for customers in Western Europe, and says it is working to restore normal service within the hour.
The unplanned downtime began at 06:08 UTC, when europe-west2-b, one of three zones in the London region, started experiencing problems.
In an update on its status page, Google Cloud said at 11:58 UTC that full recovery of workloads should be "completed, tentatively" by 13:00 UTC. Customers can expect another update at that point, which will either confirm that the issue is resolved or acknowledge that engineers are still working on a fix.
Services affected included BigQuery Data Transfer Service, Cloud Filestore, Cloud Run, Google App Engine, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Managed Service for Apache Kafka. Customers that were affected reportedly included Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Royal Mail, Rightmove, DPD, BT, Screwfix and Revolut. The cause, according to Google, was power.
"A power event caused an outage within europe-west2-b zone. The power event is mitigated. We are seeing the recovery of services and are prioritizing the recovery of existing workloads. Customers may not be able to yet create new workloads."
The Register asked Google for further detail, but the company said the only information available is on the status page.
Dr Amro Al-Said Ahmad, a lecturer in computer science at Keele University, told The Register that the incident shows the "fragility" of the cloud model. He estimates that a total of 38 services were down.
"The incident highlights the dependency effect of modern cloud ecosystems. When a core cloud region experiences failures, the impact extends far beyond the directly affected services. Applications, APIs, databases, authentication systems, payment platforms, analytics pipelines, and third-party SaaS products that depend on those services can all experience cascading failures."
"A problem in a single cloud region can therefore propagate through an entire digital supply chain, affecting organisations that are several layers removed from the original outage. While this is a regional outage centered on europe-west2, the breadth of affected services highlights a key cloud engineering lesson: resilience is not achieved by simply moving to the cloud. True resilience requires designing for regional failures through multi-region deployments, workload portability, and tested disaster recovery procedures."
*Updated at 17:37 UTC on October 20, 2026:*
Google's status page now says the issue was mitigated for most customers at 14:03 UTC, and normal service resumed for the majority of them.
"The issue with impacted GCP products has been mitigated for most of the customers and it is believed to be affecting currently a very small number of customers and our Engineering Team is working on it."
"No further updates will be provided here. We will publish an analysis of this incident once we have completed our internal investigation. We thank you for your patience while we're working on resolving the issue."