Google Cloud is experiencing outages in London that appear to have knocked out a number of banking services.
An update on Google Cloud’s status dashboard states that it’s seeing service issues at its europe-west2 region, which is based in London.
A handful of banking apps and services, including Halifax and Revolut, reported issues on Tuesday that coincided with Google Cloud’s disruptions. Some companies said that the Google Cloud outage was the cause, while others attributed it to an unnamed third-party provider.
Users of some affected banking apps have said in social media posts that they can’t make card payments, log in to the app, or transfer money.
“We can confirm that all our customers’ money and data are safe. We’ve been working to fix the issue since it was identified this morning and apologize to anyone affected and for any inconvenience caused,” Revolut said in a statement. The outage is due to Google Cloud, a person familiar with the matter said.
“We’re aware some customers are having issues with our app and online. We’re sorry about this and are working hard to fix it,” Halifax posted on X.
Emma, a popular UK budgeting app, also reported outages on Tuesday. “Emma is currently down due to a Google Cloud outage affecting services in London since 7am. This is a technical outage, not a security issue,” the company said on X.
A Google spokesperson said the company was investigating the issue and referred Business Insider to the status dashboard.
Some have taken to X to share how the outage was disrupting their lives. One person said they’ve had to cancel their beauty appointments in Japan, and another said their card was declined at the airport and they couldn’t reach the support team.
The outage also appears to have affected non-finance companies, too, according to Downdetector, a site that tracks online service disruptions.
An X account for DPD, a delivery service, said in a post that its website is affected, and the web-hosting platform SiteGround said the outage has hit its UK data center. SiteGround said in its post that its engineers are working with Google Cloud engineers to address the issue.
The Google Cloud outage comes as the tech giant has competed with Amazon and Microsoft to win business from enterprises, startups, and governments, particularly amid the AI boom. Reliability is a big promise built into these deals, as outages can have costly consequences for customers.
Google is not alone in being affected by outages, though: Amazon, Microsoft, and others have suffered downtime this year.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
