A power failure at a Google data center in London disrupted banks, courts and the NHS app, a reminder that many everyday services depend on a few cloud companies.
A power failure at a Google data center in London caused a chain reaction across the UK. Banking apps faltered, court video hearings were put on hold and some patients had temporary glitches on the NHS app. Problems peaked around 9am and were somewhat resolved by mid-afternoon, according to reports sent to the outage-tracking site Downdetector.
The fault hit a Google Cloud zone called europe-west2-b. A cloud zone is a group of data centers that companies rent to store information and run their software. Google said it resolved a disruption at a third-party facility in its europe-west2 region due to a power event, and that services have been restored.
Google also said it will update its public status page with an analysis of the incident. Until then, the cause of the power event is not public.
Revolut confirmed a service disruption but said all customers' money and data are safe. Lloyds said its app was working, though some people had trouble with certain online services. Effects were mostly limited to UK businesses.
This was smaller than the Amazon Web Services outage a year ago, which lasted nearly half a day. That one hit Amazon's us-east-1 hub in Virginia and reached the Roblox game, the Signal messaging app and even smart mattresses that overheated overnight. It was later traced to a bug in automation software, not a power failure.
Internet infrastructure expert Michał Woźniak said giant cloud providers, often called hyperscalers, have become too big to not fail. He called it unreasonable that a handful of companies can stop public institutions working when they have problems. Up to 60% of the UK government's infrastructure is hosted on cloud services, mostly from Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
Woźniak also pointed to Google's claim that 75% of its new code is now AI-generated and approved by engineers, and wondered how that affects reliability. Nothing in the reporting links AI to this outage.
If your customer records, phone system or client portal run on one cloud provider, an outage like this can stop your work. Ask your software vendors which cloud they use and what their backup plan is. It also helps to keep a simple manual fallback for your most important tasks, such as a recent copy of key contacts.
Ask your software vendors which cloud they rely on and what happens to your service if that cloud goes down.
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