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."