Google said an unspecified “power event” was the cause of an outage at a London data centre that resulted in widespread disruption to services including banking, businesses and courts.
The outage, which affected Google Cloud’s europe-west2-b region, was first detected at just after 7 a.m. on Tuesday, and it was not until just after noon that Google said that it had been mitigated.
Services began recovering by 1 p.m., and by 3 p.m. Google said services were back online for most customers, with “a very small number” still affected.
Hours of disruption
However, by that time services had been disrupted for much of the day, including the video system used by defendants, lawyers and other parties to attend remote court hearings across England and Wales.
The issue is believed to have delayed several hearings. The system is often used by defendants who are in custody and need to attend court, among other purposes.
Leading online bank Revolut was one of the worst affected, with customers unable to make card payments, carry out cash withdrawals, or make transfers.
Banking services
By 5 p.m. Revolut marked only six of 27 services as working normally, including support chat and internal transfers. Revolut said customers’ funds and data were safe.
Customers of Lloyds Banking Group banks Lloyds Bank, Halifax and Bank of Scotland reported issues.
The outage affected businesses’ websites and the online booking services for services such as DPD and Royal Mail, according to customers.
Google said it would publish an analysis of the issue following an internal investigation.
The incident came one year after a major outage at Amazon Web Services affected more than 1,000 organisations, including UK banks, for most of the day of Monday, 20 October – the same day that the Google Cloud outage occurred.
“Yet again, we’re seeing just how dependent businesses have become on a relatively small number of technology providers, and how much disruption a failure at one of them can cause,” said Scott Dawson, chief executive of the UK arm of payment processing company DECTA.
“Banks and payment providers spend a fortune on keeping their systems running, but how many know whether their backup supplier is using the same Google infrastructure as their main one? That’s something I’d want an answer to.
“Resilience may not be particularly glamorous, but it’s something the industry needs to invest in and properly test. Getting everything running again is one thing, but restoring confidence in a service people depend on is quite another.”