Google Cloud Outage Hits UK Banks, Courts and NHS App
The Facts
- Google said that services had been restored by Tuesday evening after a disruption at a third-party facility in its europe-west2 cloud region, adding that there was no evidence of nefarious activity and that it would publish an analysis of the incident.
- Earlier Tuesday, Google said the issue had been mitigated for most customers and was believed to be affecting only a very small number. Some banking status pages, including those of Revolut and HSBC, still showed errors at that point.
- The company attributed the outage to a power event in its europe-west2-b zone, saying problems with multiple services began Monday at 23:08 Pacific time. The europe-west2 region covers data centers in and around London and comprises three zones.
Sources Split
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The Spin
Narrative A
Running banking, payments and public services off a single cloud region is a gamble, and the bill always comes due. Resilience has to be built in from the start, with multi-region and multi-cloud failover as a baseline rather than an afterthought. Procurement rules and supervisors should demand proof that critical functions survive when one provider goes dark.
Narrative B
Bolting on a second cloud is the priciest way to buy the least protection, since bridging two identity models, networks and policy stacks just adds failure points. Real safety comes from portability — open engines, open data and a toolchain that moves — so any provider stays a replaceable commodity. Measured exit times and costs tell regulators more than a vendor headcount.
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