Google Cloud London power failure takes card and contactless payments offline at UK banks

A power event in Google Cloud's europe-west2 London region, specifically the europe-west2-b availability zone, began at 06:08 GMT on 20 October 2026 and disrupted banking services for most of the working day. Revolut was hit hardest: sign-up, sign-in, card payments, transfers, ATM withdrawals and crypto services failed, and by 17:00 only six of its 27 listed services were working.

Lloyds, Halifax, HSBC, Bank of Scotland and NatWest also reported problems, with customers unable to withdraw money or pay by card and contactless. Google said services returned from 13:00 London time and were restored for most customers by 15:00, blamed a power event and promised an incident analysis.

This is the first large-scale test of the UK critical third parties regime, under which the Treasury in July 2026 designated Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Oracle, giving regulators power to order an independent review and, in the extreme, to restrict a provider's work with financial firms. The FCA is engaging with Google and affected firms, the Bank of England and PRA are investigating, and Treasury Committee chair Meg Hillier wrote to Andrew Bailey and Nikhil Rathi asking how they responded and for an estimate of the total impact, with an initial response requested by 4 November and customer compensation raised.

For acceptance it shows that a single cloud availability zone can stop card and contactless payments across several acquirer-banks at once.

The regulators' answer to the Treasury Committee by 4 November, Google's published incident analysis, and whether the FCA or Bank of England uses its critical third parties powers to order an independent review.

• aol.com
• The Guardian, 20 October 2026: service-by-service impact
• The Register, 20 October 2026: affected region and zone
• Treasury Committee letter to the Bank of England and FCA, 20 October 2026