Google Cloud outage in UK eases after impacting digital banks, public sector websites

Oct 20 — Alphabet's Google said on Tuesday its cloud services in the UK were back up after an ​hours-long outage that disrupted several financial firms and public-sector websites.

The outage put the spotlight on concerns among UK and EU regulators about the financial sector's growing dependence on a small ‌number of external technology providers, particularly cloud firms that support critical banking services.

British digital bank Revolut said the outage disrupted multiple ⁠services, with its status page showing card payments ​and ATM withdrawals as affected, although the firm ⁠said its customers' money and data remained safe.

CLOUD RELIANCE CONCERNS

On Tuesday, Google said engineering teams had restored ‌full service availability following ‌a disruption caused by a "power event" in its europe-west2 cloud region, a London-based network ⁠of multiple data centers and availability zones that 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, citing the risk that an outage at a major provider could disrupt multiple firms at once.

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 finance 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.

DISRUPTIONS SPREAD

Earlier in the day, Downdetector showed some reports of issues in the UK, affecting services including Lloyds Bank, HSBC, property website Rightmove, parcel delivery service DPD as well as the National Health Service England and Royal Mail.

Downdetector tracks outages by aggregating status reports from multiple sources, including users. Actual user impact may vary.

Lloyds said it expects its services ​to be back to normal soon, since the root issues have been resolved. HSBC said it was aware of ‌some customers having ‌difficulties accessing its ⁠services.

Royal Mail said it was aware of the issues and that there was no effect on letter and parcel deliveries. Rightmove, DPD and NHS England did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

After flagging issues with its website and app, ING Germany said there was no indication the disruption was due to ‌an external cause or any ​connection to third-party service providers.

(Reporting by Anhata Rooprai, Akanksha ‌Khushi and Harshita Mary Varghese ⁠in Bengaluru, Elizabeth Howcroft ​in Paris, Sam Tabahriti and Phoebe Seers in London and Toby Sterling in Amsterdam; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar ​and Joyjeet Das)

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