London Cloud Failure Halts Revolut Payments and Exposes Vendor Risk
A widespread Google Cloud outage in London disrupted dozens of services and forced fintech Revolut offline, highlighting how regional failures cascade to end users.
Key points
- Google Cloud's London region experienced failures across 36 products, including core infrastructure and storage services.
- Fintech Revolut, which runs its systems on Google Cloud, saw its app and payment features go offline for millions of users.
- Engineers have not identified the root cause, and Google has advised customers to migrate workloads to other zones if possible.
A regional failure at Google Cloud’s London data centre disrupted dozens of cloud services on Tuesday morning, directly impacting firms hosting systems in that area. The outage began at 07:08 UK time in the europe-west2 region, according to Google’s service health dashboard. Users reported increased error rates and intermittent network faults as engineers investigated the cause.
The risk
The incident demonstrates how infrastructure failures in a single cloud region can cascade to consumer-facing applications. Revolut, a London-based fintech, lost access to its app and card payment features shortly after the Google Cloud disruption started. A source familiar with the matter told Reuters that Revolut’s outage was linked to the cloud provider’s issues.
Who is exposed
Google listed 36 affected products, including Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage and BigQuery. Revolut serves more than 80 million personal users and reported problems across the UK, Ireland, France, Spain, Romania and Germany. ING Germany also reported login issues for some customers, though Reuters did not link that problem to Google Cloud.
Cost and compliance
Revolut stated that customer money and data remained safe despite the service interruption. The company noted that a technical problem had hit several features, leaving most services on its status page marked as unavailable or partially unavailable. Google has not confirmed when full service restoration will occur, nor has Revolut provided a timeline for recovery.
What happens next
Google has apologized for the disruption and advised customers to move their work to another zone or region if they can. Its next status update was scheduled for noon UK time. Organizations relying on the London region should monitor their own service health pages for specific impact details and verify whether their workloads have been successfully migrated.
Questions to ask your suppliers
Organizations should immediately contact their cloud providers to understand the scope of regional failures affecting their specific workloads. Teams usually need to verify whether multi-region failover protocols activated as expected and identify any data integrity risks. Management should be briefed on potential compliance implications if service level agreements were breached. Check whether alternative regions are fully capable of sustaining peak loads during extended outages.
What to do and how to stay safe: Google Cloud
- Review your cloud architecture to ensure critical applications are distributed across multiple geographic regions rather than relying on a single zone.
- Monitor your provider’s service health dashboard for real-time updates on regional outages and follow their recommended mitigation steps, such as workload migration.
- Verify that your backup and disaster recovery plans are current and test them regularly to ensure they function during unplanned infrastructure failures.
- Communicate proactively with customers and stakeholders if your services are impacted, providing clear information on what is affected and when to expect updates.
Step-by-step guide: Implement MFA for Cloud Accounts: A Step-by-Step Rollout Plan
General security guidance from the CloudSec Pulse newsroom. It is not confirmed advice from the organisations named in this story.
Frequently asked questions
Did Google confirm the cause of the London cloud outage?
No, Google stated that its engineers are still looking for the cause of the network faults and service errors reported in the europe-west2 region.
Was Revolut’s outage definitely caused by Google Cloud?
A person familiar with the matter told Reuters that Revolut’s outage was related to the Google Cloud disruption, as Revolut runs its backend systems on the platform.
Which Google Cloud products were affected?
Google listed 36 affected products, including Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage and BigQuery, according to its service health page.
