A disruption in Google Cloud services caused significant issues for UK banks, business websites, and court video systems on Tuesday, October 20. The incident, triggered by a power event affecting Google’s London infrastructure, led to a temporary shutdown of numerous services.
Power Event Causes Widespread Service Interruptions
The problems began early in the morning at 07:08 BST in Google’s europe-west2 region in London. A power event in the europe-west2-b zone resulted in elevated error rates and network disruptions across various services. Google’s public dashboard indicated that the incident remained active into the afternoon.
The affected services included Cloud Run, Google App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Cloud Filestore, which are essential for businesses to manage applications, containerized environments, and data storage. Such failures can bring websites and applications to a halt, even if their software remains unchanged.
Impact on Financial Institutions and Public Services
Several financial institutions experienced disruptions, with Revolut reporting issues in card payments and ATM withdrawals, though assuring customers that their money and data were secure. Halifax and HSBC acknowledged service disruptions, while Lloyds reported some online features were affected despite apps and online logins functioning.
Not all issues were directly linked to Google Cloud, as Lloyds did not confirm a connection, and outage tracking sites alone could not determine the cause of disruptions. The HM Courts and Tribunals Service reported problems with its Cloud Video Platform, impacting remote hearings across England and Wales.
Resolution and Future Considerations
Patients faced difficulties accessing appointment bookings via the NHS app, although this was due to a third-party service rather than the app itself. This issue was resolved by midday. DPD confirmed resolution of its website connection problems, and Google reported that most customer impacts had been addressed by the afternoon.
This incident is reminiscent of previous outages, such as Google’s API management issues and an AWS outage. These events highlight the broader implications of relying on shared cloud infrastructure and the need for robust backup strategies to maintain service continuity during outages.
Google has promised a full incident analysis post-investigation to clarify the root cause and outline measures to prevent future disruptions. The incident underscores the critical importance of having contingency plans to ensure essential services remain operational in the event of cloud failures.
