Halifax and online bank Revolut are among a host of UK businesses hit by a “power event” disrupting Google Cloud services today (Tuesday 20th October.)
Halifax, one of the UK’s largest mortgage lenders, and fintech Revolut both said they were in the process of working to restore their online services at lunchtime.
Revolut said it was “experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services,” but insisted that customers’ money and data were safe.
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Downdetector, which collects user reports of website problems, has reported disruption at banks, broadband providers and Royal Mail, among others. It remains to be seen exactly how many companies have been affected by the incident.
Google said that “multiple services” were “experiencing elevated errors and intermittent network failures” and that its engineers were investigating the problem.
Lloyds Banking Group, which owns Halifax, said: “We are aware of similar issues affecting other organisations and are monitoring the situation closely.”
While the situation remains developing, Google said in its most recent statement as of 12.30pm that a “power event” was causing problems with its web platform services.
In a statement on its Cloud status platform, it added that it is still suffering “an issue with multiple services.”
The statement continued: “Due to a power event we had suffered an outage within europe-west2-b zone. The power event is mitigated.
“Partial mitigation to infrastructure services will be observed within the next 30 minutes and the remaining services will be mitigated there after.”
Google Cloud is one of a handful of huge cloud computing providers, alongside the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, which essentially govern the UK’s digital infrastructure.
Its Europe-west2 zone is based in London, Google’s only UK-based cloud region, causing major issues for UK-based businesses which heavily rely on Google Cloud services.
The latest internet outage follows on from last October’s massive outage at rival AWS, when more than 1,000 sites, including UK banks, were knocked offline by an problems at its largest data centre region in the US.
Image: Google Cloud dot com
