A Google Cloud outage in Europe that knocked out digital bank Revolut Ltd and other online services for several hours on Oct 20 has mostly been resolved, the US tech company said.
The issue with Alphabet Inc’s Google Cloud suite of services "has been mitigated” for most customers, the company said in an update to its status page during the US morning. A small number of customers remain impacted, it said.
Google blamed the earlier issues on a "power event.” A spokesperson declined to comment further.
The update should eventually restore online services impacted by the outage.
On Tuesday (Oct 20) morning, Revolut said it was "experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services due to a recent outage with Google Cloud,” adding that "customers’ money and data are safe.” Services were restored by evening, a spokesperson said.
A spokesperson for HSBC Holdings Plc said it was aware that some customers on Oct 20 had "difficulties accessing our services,” but didn’t say whether the outage was tied to Google Cloud. The bank said its services "have returned to normal following earlier access issues.”
Lloyds Banking Group Plc earlier said some online services were affected, but that customers could still log into its app as normal. The company is "monitoring the situation closely,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
Google’s cloud division has made a big push to win financial services customers in an effort to compete with larger tech rivals. The concentration of cloud services among a handful of providers, including Google, Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc means that a single technical failure can cascade across thousands of websites and apps simultaneously.
Last year, a 15-hour outage at Amazon Web Services disrupted operations at hundreds of companies, including Apple Inc, McDonald’s Corp and Epic Games Inc.
"When a core cloud region experiences failures, the impact extends far beyond the directly affected services,” said Amro Al-Said Ahmad, lecturer in computer science at Keele University in England. "Applications, APIs, databases, authentication systems, payment platforms, analytics pipelines, and third-party SaaS products that depend on those services can all experience cascading failures.”
Emma, a budgeting app, went down for several hours, citing problems at Google in a post on X. "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 wrote.
ING Germany was also experiencing issues, though a spokesperson said there’s no indication that an "external cause” was to blame. – Bloomberg
