A power event at a London datacentre disrupted Google Cloud services and affected UK banking and court services, first reported by Theguardian. Patients also reported temporary glitches on the NHS app, while internet infrastructure expert Michał “rysiek” Woźniak said vital services are increasingly concentrated on infrastructure run by a handful of cloud providers.
The affected datacentre was in Google’s europe-west2-b zone. Downdetector listed Royal Mail, Revolut, HSBC and Lloyds among affected services; reports submitted to the site indicated the problems peaked at about 9am and were somewhat resolved by mid-afternoon.
Revolut confirmed a disruption affecting multiple services and said customers’ money and data were safe. Lloyd’s said its app was working, though some people were having issues with certain online services. HM Courts and Tribunal Service, which handles remote video hearings in courts across England and Wales, said its Cloud Video Platform was affected and it was working with technology partners to restore service.
Woźniak said the outages reflected the increasing concentration of the internet and vital services on infrastructure run by a few key companies, known as hyperscalers. He said their place in digital life makes switching away seem unimaginable.
Up to 60% of UK government infrastructure is hosted on cloud services, mostly Amazon, Microsoft and Google. The facts have different scopes: the day’s knock-on effects were mostly confined to UK businesses, while the government estimate concerns UK infrastructure hosted on cloud services.
The disruption had not, so far, matched the scale of last year’s AWS outage, which lasted about 15 hours and caused cascading effects worldwide. That outage was later revealed to have been caused by a bug in automation software; a separate outage was caused by an AI tool Amazon had adopted after laying off tens of thousands of staff last autumn.
Woźniak also pointed to a Google announcement this year that 75% of all new code is now AI-generated and approved by engineers, questioning how that affected the reliability and quality of Google’s services. Google said it had resolved the disruption at a third-party facility in its europe-west2 cloud region and would update its public status dashboard with an analysis of the incident.