Halifax and Revolut were among UK businesses affected by a Google Cloud services disruption in London on Tuesday. Halifax, a major mortgage lender, and fintech Revolut confirmed they were working to restore online services. The disruption also impacted Britain's court system, with HM Courts and Tribunals Service facing issues to remote hearings.
Google attributed the incident to a "power event" causing "elevated errors and intermittent network failures," noting services began recovering by early afternoon. Downdetector reported widespread issues affecting banks, broadband providers and Royal Mail. Lloyds Banking Group, Halifax's parent company, stated they were monitoring the situation, while Revolut assured customers that money and data remained safe.
The outage began at 7am and highlighted the risks of internet reliance on a few Big Tech providers. Last year's Amazon Web Services outage similarly affected Lyft, Starbucks and OpenAI's ChatGPT. As the third-largest global cloud provider, Google's infrastructure underpins critical services across finance and government.
Tuesday's incident underscores ongoing concerns about digital resilience as businesses depend increasingly on centralized cloud platforms for essential operations.
Source: Financial Times Companies · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing