A “Power Event” At Google Cloud’s London Region Affected Revolut And European Banks – What Happened?

They call it the cloud, which sounds weightless and above earthly problems. Then, on 20 October, a “power event” in Google’s London region reminded everyone that it’s really a building full of servers that need electricity like the rest of us, and when it falters, there’s nothing weightless about the fallout.

In practice, that meant services across the region were disrupted for hours. Revolut customers struggled to pay by card, move money or sign in, with other banks and services affected too.

No cyberattack has been reported, and Google hasn’t said what caused the fault, so “power event” is all anyone has to go on. Here’s what’s confirmed, what the term means inside a data centre and why one fault can reach banking and fintech services that seem to have nothing in common.

A Bad Morning In Google’s London Region

Google’s first status alert went out at 07:08 BST, flagging elevated errors and intermittent network failures across multiple services in europe-west2, its London hub. The cloud giant went on to say a power event had caused an outage within one availability zone, and that it was prioritising recovery of existing workloads.

By late afternoon, Google said: “We have resolved a disruption to Google Cloud services at a third-party facility in our europe-west2 cloud region due to a power event. Services have been restored.”

The wording puts the fault at a facility run by a third party, and Google says it’ll publish an incident analysis once its internal investigation is complete.

Revolut Takes The Brunt, But Isn’t Alone

Revolut said it was experiencing “a service disruption affecting multiple services”, that “all our customers’ money and data are safe” and that it had been working on the fix since the morning.

Its status page listed card payments, card top-ups, ATM withdrawals, transfers, currency exchange and signing in, which covers most of what anyone opens a banking app for. Revolut has since said services are restored. The statement didn’t mention Google, although a Revolut spokesperson later linked the disruption to the Google Cloud outage.

Lloyds and Halifax said some customers had trouble with apps and online services, and HSBC said some customers had difficulty accessing services before confirming a return to normal. HM Courts & Tribunals Service reported problems with the video platform used for remote hearings, and the Ministry of Justice confirmed that Google Cloud had affected its systems.

So, What Is A “Power Event”?

Google’s update points to an electrical-power disruption in the affected zone and leaves it at that. There’s still no word on whether the main grid, backup generators or cooling systems failed. For now, “power event” is just an extraordinarily formal way of admitting something stopped working.

Think of a cloud region as a campus and an availability zone as one data centre building on it, each with its own power, cooling and networking. London has three. Lose one building and the campus should carry on, but only for tenants who planned to move into another building when it happens.

Why Your Bank And A Courtroom Share A Landlord

Banks, retailers, delivery apps and public services often rent their computing and storage from the same provider. So when a shared cloud zone drops, their customer services crash at the same time, no matter how different those companies might be.

That’s cloud concentration risk, and regulators already track it. The UK has put AWS, Microsoft and Oracle under direct oversight as critical third parties to the financial sector, and EU regulators designated Google Cloud among critical providers in 2025.

Even The Cloud Needs A Plug

This was a reminder for fintechs building on shared cloud infrastructure.

One glitch in one zone can break payment processing and lock users out before breakfast. Ultimately, much of a digital bank’s uptime is in the hands of a landlord they don’t control.

Google’s incident analysis should show whether the fault was with the facility, the equipment or the design around it, and banks and regulators will watch it closely. Until then, the cloud has had a fresh reminder that it still needs a plug.