Google Cloud outage lasts 6 hours and 10 minutes, draws European regulatory scrutiny
Key Facts
British and European regulators contacted Google following an outage of its cloud services on October 20, 2026, that affected British financial institutions' ability to serve customers, according to parliament's Treasury Committee and Reuters. Google put the duration of the service disruption at 6 hours and 10 minutes in its preliminary report and announced that service had been restored for most customers on the day of the incident. Britain's Financial Conduct Authority said it was in contact with the company about the incident, Reuters reported. At the European level, the European Banking Authority contacted Google Cloud to obtain additional information, understand the implications of the outage and assess its potential impact on financial institutions in the European Union. Affected services at Revolut included card payments and ATM withdrawals, according to Reuters. The company confirmed that customers' money and data were safe as those services faced disruption caused by the cloud outage.
Google's preliminary report traced the outage to a loss of power at the facility, followed by a failure of the systems responsible for starting backup generators and transferring the electrical load to them. The failure affected both primary and backup controllers, preventing the generators from starting before the uninterruptible power supply batteries ran out. As the batteries were depleted, servers, networking equipment and storage equipment shut down, according to the company's account of events inside the facility. The effects spread to regional infrastructure that had not lost power after workloads automatically shifted there from the affected zone. Google said the failover traffic "exhausted available compute resources and processing capacity in other availability zones", extending the impact to neighbouring zones. Calls to components in the affected zone also delayed processing and validation operations in the regional infrastructure. The incident's effects thus progressed from power loss and backup supply failure within the facility to pressure on computing resources and processing delays outside the zone that had shut down, according to the company's preliminary report.
The regulatory follow-up comes under British rules that hold banks ultimately responsible for the services they provide to customers, according to Reuters. That responsibility includes services banks rely on external suppliers to operate, including those linked to the cloud infrastructure affected by the incident. Financial Conduct Authority Chief Executive Nikhil Rathi had warned of the wider consequences of outages at suppliers whose systems serve many financial institutions. Rathi said in a statement published by the Bank of England that "the same suppliers serving thousands of institutions means a single failure can have repercussions across the financial system". Parliament's Treasury Committee previously documented at least 158 banking IT outage incidents from January 2023 to February 2025. Those incidents affected millions of customers' ability to access and use banking services, according to the committee. The tally covers banking IT outages during the historical monitoring period, while the current follow-up concerns the disruption to Google Cloud services and its impact on financial institutions that rely on them.
On the parliamentary front, Treasury Committee Chair Meg Hillier put questions to the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority about their handling of the incident. The committee said the questions sought to establish how the 2 bodies were using their powers in response to the disruption. According to the committee's letter, both bodies were asked to provide an initial response by Wednesday, November 4, as part of its examination of the incident's implications for financial services. The committee set January 20, 2027, as the deadline for a full response, allowing for a more comprehensive account of the regulatory response after the initial reply. Through these 2 responses, the committee is seeking clarification on how supervisory powers are being used to address the outage that affected financial institutions' ability to serve their customers.