Cloud

Google Cloud Power Outage Takes Down Revolut, ING and Spotify

co-produced by AI20. October 2026, 16:59

A Revolut card in a card holder. © Aleksandrs Karevs via Unsplash

One power problem at a London data center, and suddenly millions of people can no longer pay with their cards: An outage at Google Cloud on Tuesday knocked out Revolut, Germany’s ING and a whole range of other services for hours. Google apologized to everyone affected. The incident shows once again how much of the internet depends on just a handful of cloud providers.

A “Power Event” in London

The outage hit Google Cloud’s europe-west2 region in London. According to Google, several services there were experiencing “elevated errors and intermittent network failures.” Google later attributed the problem to a “power event.” The first disruptions were noticed at around 7 a.m. British time, and by around midday Google said most workloads in the region were recovering. It took longer still for all dependent services to run smoothly again, according to Tom’s Guide. There is no indication of a cyberattack.

“We apologise to all who are affected by the disruption,” Google said.

The Services That Went Down

Revolut was hit hardest. Some customers were unable to log in, make transfers, pay by card or withdraw cash from A.T.M.s. Stock and crypto trading and Revolut Business were also affected. On Downdetector, more than 1,500 people reported problems in the morning alone. “We can confirm that all our customers’ money and data are safe,” Revolut said.

Others affected included:

Banks: ING in Germany, where customers were unable to access online banking at the same time (ING also uses Google Cloud services), as well as Lloyds, Halifax and HSBC in Britain and the finance app Emma.
Streaming: Spotify saw a sharp rise in outage reports around midday.
Logistics: The parcel service DPD and the parcel tracking of Britain’s Royal Mail.
Public services: The app of Britain’s National Health Service and livestreams from British courts.

Exactly One Year Ago, AWS Went Down

This is not an isolated case. Almost exactly one year ago, an outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s largest cloud provider, took down a sizable part of the internet. The trigger back then was a DNS problem with the DynamoDB database in the key US-EAST-1 region in Virginia. The effects were felt worldwide for many hours:

Apps and games: Snapchat, Fortnite, Roblox and the messaging app Signal were disrupted.
Smart home: Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa and Ring doorbells stopped working properly.
Finance: The payment app Venmo and the crypto exchange Coinbase went down, and in Britain, so did the apps of Lloyds Banking Group and the website of the tax authority HMRC.
Learning and A.I.: Duolingo and the A.I. search engine Perplexity were affected as well.

AWS has not been spared since then either. In March, two data centers in the United Arab Emirates were damaged in drone strikes, disrupting dozens of services in the region. And in November 2025, a configuration error at Cloudflare tripped up half the internet (in German), from ChatGPT to X to Shopify stores.

Dependence on a Few Providers

The pattern is always the same: AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud share most of the cloud market, and many companies rely on just one provider or even a single region. If the power goes out there or a configuration goes wrong, dozens of companies and millions of users are hit at once.

For banks, this is especially sensitive. Since January 2025, the E.U.’s Digital Operational Resilience Act, known as DORA, has required them to show how they would cope with the failure of key IT service providers, and major cloud providers have been placed under the direct oversight of E.U. financial supervisors as critical service providers. Spreading systems across several regions or providers offers better protection, but it costs significantly more. Revolut has not yet said how its infrastructure is set up or why the failure of a single London region had such far-reaching consequences.