Google Cloud Outage Disrupts UK Banks and Courts as Financial Regulators Examine Incident

A major outage affecting Google Cloud infrastructure in London disrupted online banking and remote court hearings across Britain on Tuesday 20 October 2026, prompting questions about the resilience of technology services used by critical institutions.

Google attributed the disruption in its europe-west2 cloud region to a power event. Its official service dashboard subsequently marked the incident as closed after seven hours and 52 minutes. The company said services had been restored, although individual customers could still have needed support with lingering effects.

Banks and court hearings affected

Revolut confirmed that the disruption affected services including card payments and cash withdrawals. The company said customers' money and data remained safe. Lloyds Banking Group, Halifax and HSBC also reported or acknowledged problems affecting some customers, while other online businesses experienced disruption.

HM Courts and Tribunals Service reported difficulties with its Cloud Video Platform, used for some remote court hearings in England and Wales. The disruption affected the ability of some participants to join hearings remotely.

Reports of problems at other organisations do not establish that every reported fault had the same underlying cause. The scale of individual customer impact has not been fully quantified.

Regulators seek information

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said it was engaging with Google and affected firms to understand the impact. The incident came just months after Google Cloud EMEA Limited, alongside Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Oracle entities, was designated a critical third party to the UK financial sector, with the relevant regulations taking effect on 13 July 2026.

Under this regime, the FCA, Bank of England and Prudential Regulation Authority jointly oversee designated providers' systemically important services. The framework is intended to strengthen operational resilience; it does not guarantee that outages cannot occur.

Treasury Committee demands answers

On 20 October, the House of Commons Treasury Committee published details of a letter from its chair, Dame Meg Hillier, to the Governor of the Bank of England and the FCA's chief executive. The committee is seeking information about how the regulators will use their powers in response to the outage.

The correspondence represents parliamentary scrutiny, not a finding of regulatory wrongdoing. No enforcement action or breach of the critical-third-party rules has been established by the published material.

Questions about dependence on cloud providers

The incident has renewed attention on the concentration of essential digital services among a small number of cloud infrastructure providers. A failure affecting shared infrastructure can interrupt services at multiple organisations at once, even when their customers use different brands.

Google has said it will publish further analysis following its investigation. At present, the company has identified a power-related failure; there is no verified evidence that the incident was a cyberattack.

Sources

1. Google Cloud — Official service health and incident record
2. House of Commons Treasury Committee — Bank of England and FCA letter, 20 October 2026
3. Financial Conduct Authority — Critical third parties regulatory framework
4. Reuters — Google Cloud outage affects UK financial and public services, 20 October 2026
5. ITV News — Banks and courts affected, 20 October 2026