UK watchdogs push for answers on Google Cloud outage after major banks disrupted
UK watchdogs are pushing for answers following an outage at Google Cloud that has led to a major services disruption across British companies on Tuesday.
Google confirmed it was facing “issues” in its “europe-west2 region,” which refers to London according to the firm’s cloud service table. It has affected dozens of websites across the UK, spanning banks, delivery services and retail brands.
Revolut said on Tuesday morning it was experiencing a “service disruption” across multiple features. Problems were also reported at Lloyds, HSBC and Barclays.
Google Cloud confirmed that multiple services were “experiencing elevated errors and intermittent network failures” in London. On Tuesday afternoon it said the issue was fixed for “most” customers and it would publish an analysis of the incident following an internal investigation.
The Downdetector, which is used to track major outages across consumer platforms, showed a spike for Revolut around 8am with more than 1,500 issues reported. It also showed spikes for Rightmove, Royal Mail and NHS England.
A spokesperson for the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said it was “aware of an incident affecting services provided by Google and are engaging with them and affected firms to understand the impact”.
“People need to be able to access their money and make payments, so we expect firms to fix issues quickly, keep their customers informed and ensure no one is left out of pocket,” they added.
City AM understands the Bank of England is also in contact with affected firms as well as Google as part of its oversight regime.
Chair of the Treasury Select Committee Dame Meg Hillier has written to Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, and Nikhil Rathi, the boss of the FCA, to establish how they will use their powers to respond to the incident. Hillier has called for an initial response by Wednesday 4 November and a full response in three months’ time.
The City watchdog and Bank were handed enhanced powers in July to oversee the UK arms of Google Cloud and its Silicon Valley peers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft. It followed a swathe of platforms facing issues after a AWS outage in October 2025.
The regulators are tasked with ensuring cloud providers are resilient and actively reducing the risk of cyber-attacks and major outages. Meanwhile, firms are expected to stress-test for how to respond to emergency scenarios that would put their operations