October 20 (Albania Journal) – Alphabet’s Google said on Tuesday that its cloud services in the UK had been fully restored following an hours-long outage that disrupted several financial firms and public-sector websites.
The incident raised concerns among UK and European Union regulators about the financial sector’s growing dependence on a small number of external technology providers, particularly cloud computing companies that support critical banking services.
British digital bank Revolut said the disruption affected several of its services, including card payments and ATM withdrawals, according to its status page. However, the company said customers’ money and data remained safe.
Cloud Dependence Raises Regulatory Concerns
Google said its engineering teams had restored full service availability following a disruption caused by a “power event” in its europe-west2 cloud region. The region, based in London, comprises multiple data centres and availability zones and serves customers across Europe.
In July, the UK brought Google Cloud, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Oracle under direct regulatory oversight as critical third-party suppliers to the financial sector. The move was aimed at addressing the risk that an outage at a major provider could disrupt multiple financial firms simultaneously.
Google Cloud was also among 19 technology companies designated by EU regulators last year as critical third-party computing providers on which the bloc’s financial industry depends.
“We are aware of an incident affecting services provided by Google and are engaging with them and affected firms to understand the impact,” a spokesperson for the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority said.
Outage Reports Spread Across Multiple Services
Earlier on Tuesday, outage-tracking website Downdetector recorded reports of problems affecting several services in the UK, including Lloyds Bank, HSBC, property website Rightmove, parcel delivery company DPD, NHS England and Royal Mail.
Downdetector tracks service disruptions by aggregating reports from multiple sources, including users. The actual impact on customers may vary.
Lloyds said it expected its services to return to normal soon after the underlying issues were resolved. HSBC said it was aware that some customers were experiencing difficulties accessing its services.
Royal Mail said it was aware of the issues but confirmed that letter and parcel deliveries had not been affected.
Rightmove, DPD and NHS England did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
Meanwhile, ING Germany, after reporting problems with its website and app, said there was no indication that the disruption had been caused by an external factor or was connected to third-party service providers.
