A power failure at a Google Cloud data center near London caused severe service disruptions on Tuesday, affecting the online services of multiple UK banks and businesses. Google stated in a service health update that the incident began at 06:08 GMT and was caused by a “power event”; as of 12:10 GMT, most services had returned to normal, approximately six hours later.

The digital bank Revolut was one of the most severely affected institutions, with customers unable to use ATM withdrawals, bank transfers, and card top-ups. Lloyds Bank and HSBC also confirmed that some customers experienced difficulties accessing online services. Lloyds later stated that the root cause had been resolved and expected all services to return to normal soon.

In addition to the banking sector, service disruptions were also reported for the property website Rightmove, the delivery company DPD, Royal Mail, and the court video platform CVP, among others. The network service tracking platform Downdetector recorded hundreds of user reports of related issues.

This incident has once again raised concerns about global over-reliance on a few cloud service providers. Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Surrey, pointed out that Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services are the only three companies in the UK capable of handling large-scale enterprise data, and these centers are “vulnerable to localized infrastructure failures”; with the surge in demand driven by AI, this dependency is “intensifying”.