UPDATED Google Cloud has blamed a “power event” for taking down multiple online products for customers in Western Europe, and is pledging to restore normal service within the hour. The unplanned downtime for customers began at 0608 UTC when europe-west-2-b, one of three local availability zones in the London region, started playing up. According to an update on its status page, Google Cloud said at 1158 UTC that full recovery workloads should be “completed, tentatively” by 1300 UTC. Customers can expect another update at that point, with Google either giving the thumbs up, thumbs sideways or having to admit engineers are still working on a fix. Services that went AWOL included BigQuery Data TransferService, Cloud Filestore, Cloud Run, Google App Engine, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Managed Service for Apache Kafka. So what caused online services to melt at customers including Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Royal Mail, Rightmove, DPD, BT, Screwfix and Revolut? Power. "A power event caused an outage within europe-west2-b zone. The power event is mitigated. We are seeing the recovery of services and are prioritizing the recovery of existing workloads.Customers may not be able to yet create new workloads." The Register has asked Google for further elucidation but it said the only information is available on the status page. The "fragility" of the cloud model is again on display, Dr Amro Al-Said Ahmad, a lecturer in computer science at Keele University told The Register. He estimates that a total of 38 services were down and out for the count. "The incident highlights the dependency effect of modern cloud ecosystems. When a core cloud region experiences failures, the impact extends far beyond the directly affected services. Applications, APIs, databases, authentication systems, payment platforms, analytics pipelines, and third-party SaaS products that depend on those services can all experience cascading failures." "A problem in a single cloud region can therefore propagate through an entire digital supply chain, affecting organisations that are several layers removed from the original outage. While this is a regional outage centered on europe-west2, the breadth of affected services highlights a key cloud engineering lesson: resilience is not achieved by simply moving to the cloud. True resilience requires designing for regional failures through multi-region deployments, workload portability, and tested disaster recovery procedures." Updated at 17.37 UTC on October 20, 2026, to add: Google's status page says it mostly ironed out the wrinkles at 14.03 UTC and normal service resumed for the majority of customers. "The issue with impacted GCP products has been mitigated for most of the customers and it is believed to be affecting currently a very small number of customers and our Engineering Team is working on it." "No further updates will be provided here. We will publish an analysis of this incident once we have completed our internal investigation. We thank you for your patience while we're working on resolving the issue." ®

UPDATED Google Cloud customers in Western Europe are waking up to severe disruption affecting multiple services and, as yet, there is no estimated time of recovery. The europe-west-2-b is one of three local availability zones in the London region, intended to help protect against hardware or regional failures. The downtime began at 0608 UTC, meaning customers need more than a coffee to feel OK about today. According to Google Cloud’s status page: “Multiple Google Cloud services are experiencing elevated errors and intermittent network failures in europe-west2 region.” BigQuery Data TransferService, Cloud Filestore, Cloud Run, Google App Engine, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Managed Service for Apache Kafka are all impacted, the tech biz confirmed. “Our engineering team continues to investigate the issue,” Google added. “We apologize to all who are affected by the disruption.” Techies on Reddit said the interruption was having a cascading affect on multiple suppliers. One said: “oh man the classic one zone takes a nap and your non-HA service is in it.” “Loads of stuff seems to be down, DNS somewhere,” mused another. Over on the platform formerly known as Twitter, customers weren’t any happier - but that’s par for the course for people that use Elon Musk’s X. “Major GCP incident affecting Europe regions, good start to the day,” said one. According to Down Detector, multiple customers are caught up including Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Royal Mail, Rightmove, DPD, BT, Screwfix and Revolut. “We are currently experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services. We can confirm that all our customers’ money and data are safe. We’ve been working to fix the issue since it was identified this morning and apologise to anyone affected and for any inconvenience caused,” said Revolut. Workarounds? “None for now now,” Google said. It plans to update customers at around 0930 UTC. ® Updated at 10.18 UTC on October 20, 2026, to add: Google has updated its status page to say Studio is not impacted by this outage and told customers looking for a workaround: "If feasible, the impacted customer may try to migrate their workload impacted to another available location."

After years of governments and tech vendors banging the digital sovereignty drum, most large organizations have concluded that true technological independence is beyond their reach. That's according to new research from Capgemini, which found that 59 percent of organizations regard complete digital sovereignty as unrealistic. Instead, two-thirds define it in terms of what the consultancy calls "resilient interdependence" – accepting continued reliance on outside technology providers while trying to ensure those dependencies do not threaten critical operations. It's a pragmatic conclusion, though perhaps not surprising given how thoroughly tangled those dependencies have become. Digital sovereignty broadly refers to an organization's ability to retain control over its data, infrastructure, software, and critical technology operations, including where they are hosted and whose laws govern them. Capgemini surveyed 1,300 business and technology executives in April 2026, covering companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue and government departments with budgets above $1 billion. Its separate Digital Sovereignty Index, based on an analysis of 866 organizations, found that 86 percent had significant exposure to foreign or externally controlled supply chains. Across the research, just 14 percent reported end-to-end visibility into dependencies throughout their wider technology ecosystems. Getting out of those relationships isn't necessarily straightforward either. Some 36 percent said moving away from a critical technology provider would take more than a year, while another 10 percent said they had no viable alternative. That leaves organizations trying to work out how much independence they actually need, rather than rebuilding their entire technology stacks closer to home. European respondents appeared particularly receptive to that compromise. Three-quarters defined sovereignty in terms of resilient interdependence, compared with half of respondents in the US. The UK also tended to view sovereignty through the lens of risk: 56 percent of British respondents primarily associated it with resilience and risk mitigation. This doesn't mean the subject has disappeared from the corporate agenda: 93 percent of respondents said it had been discussed at board level, and 44 percent ranked it among their board's top priorities. AI is adding another dependency for those boards to worry about. Three-quarters of organizations identified AI as a key focus of their sovereignty efforts, ahead of cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, data, and software. Money presents another problem. Just under half said they would pay extra for sovereign technology. Among those willing to do so, the acceptable premium averaged 23 percent. Perhaps the more uncomfortable finding concerns what happens when those carefully accepted dependencies actually fail. Among organizations that had recently suffered an operational disruption, just 42 percent had contingency plans in place. Almost two-thirds of US organizations were prepared, compared with slightly more than a third in Europe and Asia-Pacific. Capgemini argues the answer isn't complete technological independence, but deciding which systems and capabilities matter enough to keep under tighter control, while building alternatives and recovery plans around everything else. Given that one in 10 organizations cannot currently replace a critical provider at all, this may be less a philosophical embrace of interdependence than an acknowledgment of where the exits actually are. ®