Google Cloud London outage: one-zone power event hit 38 products
A power event in one London zone disrupted Revolut for hours, and Google reported errors beyond that zone. What that means for multi-zone setups.
The short read
A power event in one Google Cloud zone in London led to almost eight hours of trouble across 38 products.
- Revolut's services were disrupted for hours, and Google reported errors elsewhere in the europe-west2 region, not only in the zone that lost power.
What you can do with this
List which of your systems and vendors run in europe-west2, and keep spare capacity running in a second zone. Creating it mid-outage may fail, as Google warned on Tuesday.
Google Cloud’s London region, europe-west2, had problems for almost eight hours on Tuesday, October 20. Google’s incident record dates the start to 06:08 UTC, names a “power event” in a single zone, europe-west2-b, and lists 38 affected products.
Google’s own design guide says a one-zone power fault should be survivable by moving to the region’s other zones. On Tuesday, Google still reported errors elsewhere in the region. If you or a supplier run in London on Google Cloud, that gap is your risk.
What broke, and who noticed
The best-known affected company was Revolut. The Stack reported that the bank told its 80 million users it was “experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services,” and that its status page showed core services failing. Bloomberg reported that Revolut blamed Google Cloud, while The Stack noted that Revolut’s own statement did not name a cause.
Other UK apps reported trouble too. The budgeting app Emma blamed the Google Cloud disruption for its own outage, and Halifax acknowledged problems with its app and website without saying why, according to IANS. IANS also noted it was unclear whether every affected service relied on Google Cloud.
Google’s timeline, from its own updates
We read every update in Google’s incident record. The times, in UTC:
- 06:08: the problem starts.
- 08:35: first public update, 2 hours 27 minutes after the start: “elevated errors and intermittent network failures in europe-west2 region.” Workaround: “None for now.”
- 09:24: Google suggests moving affected workloads “to another available location (zone or region).”
- 11:12: the cause appears. “Due to a power event we had suffered an outage within europe-west2-b zone.” Services in that zone are unavailable, and “some services in europe-west2 region may experience elevated errors.”
- 11:58: Google is “prioritizing the recovery of existing workloads. Customers may not be able to yet create new workloads.”
- 14:03: mitigated “for most of the customers.” Google promises a written analysis.
The list of 38 products covers the basics most apps sit on: Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub, Cloud Run, Spanner, load balancing and Cloud NAT.
Why one zone was supposed to be enough
Google’s own regions and zones documentation says it designs zones “to minimize the risk of correlated failures caused by physical infrastructure outages like power, cooling, or networking,” so that if one zone goes down “you can transfer traffic to another zone in the same region.”
That is the promise multi-zone setups rest on. On Tuesday the fault was a power event, it started in one zone, and Google still reported errors in other parts of the region. The same page says spreading across regions “provides an even higher degree of failure independence.” We do not yet know why the damage spread beyond europe-west2-b; Google has not published its analysis.
The 11:58 note matters too. Plans that create fresh capacity during an outage, such as autoscaling into a healthy zone, assume you can create new workloads. For part of the recovery, Google said you might not.
What to do now
- Check where you actually run. List which of your services, and which of your critical vendors, sit in europe-west2. Ask vendors directly; Revolut’s statement did not name its provider.
- Keep spare capacity running in a second zone rather than relying on creating it when trouble starts.
- Price a second region for the few systems you cannot lose for eight hours, such as payments or customer login. Google’s documentation says traffic within a region is “always cheaper and faster” than across regions, so this costs money and latency; spend it only where an outage would cost more.
- Follow Google’s status page at
status.cloud.google.com, but do not rely on it. On Tuesday, Google’s first public note came 2 hours 27 minutes after the start, so your own monitoring has to raise the alarm first. - Read Google’s analysis when it lands, and check whether the errors outside europe-west2-b came from a shared service you also depend on.
Sources
- Multiple services are experiencing issues in the europe-west2 region, Google Cloud Service Health, October 20, 2026
- Regions and zones, Google Cloud documentation
- Google Cloud incident knocks Revolut offline, The Stack, October 20, 2026
- Google Cloud outage in London disrupts Revolut, other online services, IANS via Telangana Today, October 20, 2026
- Bloomberg’s report on the outage, October 20, 2026, as summarized on Techmeme
