Google Cloud's London Region Faltered, and UK Banks and Courts Felt It
Google Cloud said it resolved disruption at its UK cloud site that had caused an outage affecting UK banks, businesses and the courts. The company reported an issue with multiple services at its London data centre complex, europe-west2, early on Tuesday.
Revolut, Lloyds Bank and HSBC were among the UK services confirming disruption that morning, after thousands of reports of problems were raised by users online. More than 1,500 reports of issues affecting Revolut alone were flagged to a platform outage monitor shortly after 08:00 BST.
A single named region inside one provider's London footprint, and the morning's payments and banking for a lot of people go wobbly.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
The calendar is doing part of the arguing here: this incident came exactly one year after more than 1,000 sites, including UK banks, were knocked offline for hours during an outage at AWS's largest cloud site. Two different large providers producing the same shape of failure in consecutive years is a poor advertisement for shrugging at concentration risk.
Prof Feng Li of Bayes Business School calls the outage a reminder of how deeply economies depend on just a handful of cloud providers. A reminder is cheap, though. The reminder arrives free; the redundancy that would make the next one boring costs money, and that is where the interesting decision actually sits.