Google Cloud outage affects almost all banking and other operations in Europe

264 points - today at 10:26 AM

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nickcw today at 11:34 AM
From Google's status page https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/Xs2XTHzAVC9YnafnPy...

    We are experiencing an issue with multiple services in
    europe-west2 beginning on Monday, 2026-10-19 23:08 PDT.
    
    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.
So some kind of power failure happened to bring down one zone. Unfortunate, but this kind of stuff happens. That is why all the cloud providers have multiple zones, and I'm amazed the big companies reported as down weren't using multiple zones.

(Also reporting the times in PDT is quite unhelpful for users of this zone who are likely based in the UK or EU)

gadders today at 11:14 AM
>>Google cloud outage takes down HSBC, Revolut, Bank of Scotland, Llyods, Equifax, more

You will probably have issues logging into Llyods even when the cloud is back up.

otar today at 7:57 PM
The EU should really prioritise building AWS and Google Cloud alternatives with European values.

> ssh root@eu-cloud

  We value your privacy. We and our 847 partners track your network packets.

  [Accept all]  [Manage preferences]
paweladamczuk today at 10:26 AM
For me it was Revolut. No access to my main account, no withdrawals, no card payments since the morning. App doesn't work, there's no phone number to call, nobody to talk to. Dark side of neobanking, I guess.
bcvvvy today at 11:23 AM
I bank with HSBC. Everything is up and working.

A lot of the information people are leveraging here comes from Downdetector which is mostly users reporting that stuff is down, not whether they are actually down. It's a really bad source.

samkone today at 6:38 PM
That's not the whole. That's the UK. I use banking services in Switzerland, built on GCP. No interruption at all. Been travelling all day.
lucideer today at 5:40 PM
Possibly the most surprising part of this is the extremely quiet reporting on it. I've not seen many news outlets pick it up, & even on HN - they were down for almost 8 hours & I didn't see even see this post hit the frontpage (it might have briefly at some stage).

I guess service reliability is just no longer something we consider a big deal in today's tech landscape.

gentlerain today at 10:56 AM
Countries talking about AI sovereignty, when they forgot compute sovereignty
bobbiechen today at 4:55 PM
Anyone have a read on the implications for Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) compliance here? Google Cloud seems to be a critical third-party vendor for these financial institutions. The top penalties for DORA can be very expensive (% of worldwide revenue fines).
Muromec today at 3:31 PM
You can't hurt our mainframe running COBOL. Suck it zoomers!
stymaar today at 3:27 PM
Nobody has never been fired for using ~~IBM~~ ~~Oracle~~ Google.
bpavuk today at 2:15 PM
I wonder if it's somehow related to me having to re-sign into my account after clearing Google Play Services data just a few hours ago.
BlackRabbit1 today at 11:52 AM
Most likely it knocked out the "Ing" bank in Germany.
misstuned today at 11:44 AM
I couldn't unlock a shared city bike this morning on the Beryl system, probably the same outage.
diamondDrill today at 12:30 PM
how can cloud inf go down? that was the main selling point, it makes no sense
mistic92 today at 12:02 PM
Ah again London region :D
gaiagraphia today at 12:47 PM
It's a little worrying that banking with an institution from one of the world's financial capitals is so vulnerable. I would've thought London would've been priding itself on security, stability, safety, etc. Confidence in their systems is their bread and butter

Afaik, even Russia and Ukraine aren't having such issues while dealing with data centres getting droned, lol.

It's really quite poor performance.

rvz today at 11:49 AM
Since there are no humans working on outages here is the test for superintelligence:

Can someone ask Claude, Codex, Copilot, Antigravity, Devin to resolve this outage?

No Googling or help from humans this time.

arbor-group today at 1:59 PM
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dortesedixson today at 1:43 PM
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pdfroll today at 1:17 PM
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pravex today at 12:12 PM
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Heronsunny today at 11:48 AM
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josefritzishere today at 12:50 PM
Let me draw a line between this and the Ukrainian bombing of Russian Yandex data centers. This is a sign of structural vulnerability. If one power failure can take down more than 5 banks, what you are describing is a valuable target. It's ironic that the cloud services that promised to harden systems have delivered another layer of vulnerability.
onetokeoverthe today at 12:00 PM
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nfrankel today at 12:49 PM
Migrate to the Cloud, they said. It will be more resilient and less expensive, they said.
bookofjoe today at 1:03 PM
Ironic: yesterday X Money invited me to open an account — with a starting gift balance of $15. Deeper currents?
dangoodmanUT today at 12:27 PM
At this point, the way I see it is:

- There's AWS

- There's Azure

- There's everything else

And I don't even use Azure, I just hear it's good (and they don't charge cross-AZ traffic)