A power outage at a Google Cloud data center in London created severe difficulties throughout the day on October 20 for numerous European platforms, including the online bank Revolut. By evening, Google representatives officially announced that specialists had managed to fully restore the normal operation of the provided services.
The problems began in the morning when, around 09:00 GMT, the company reported multiple issues arising in the European europe-west2 region, caused by an emergency incident in the power supply system. Until the technical faults were rectified, users in the United Kingdom, Malta, Germany, Lithuania, and Latvia experienced major difficulties when making payments or logging into applications.
The wave of technical disruptions also noticeably impacted British government agencies, major banks, and international delivery services, many of which were forced to temporarily restrict digital operations. In particular, issues were recorded on the judicial system's video communication platform, disrupting a number of important hearings held via video call, while the unavailability of the National Health Service app deprived citizens of the ability to book medical appointments.
Concurrently, customers of ING Bank and DHL in Germany, as well as Booking.com in Italy and Spain, also faced access barriers. Revolut assured that customers' financial funds and personal data remained completely safe, regardless of these systemic disruptions.
Such large-scale incidents prove that the stability of modern internet services always directly depends on the reliability of the underlying physical infrastructure. Notably, a similar major outage was previously recorded at the same data center in July 2022, caused by a cooling system failure during hot weather conditions, whereas this time London was experiencing typical cool autumn weather.
Global reliance on a single centralized digital infrastructure provider leaves the modern economy seriously vulnerable. When one major cloud hub fails, banks and government platforms are paralyzed simultaneously.
