GOOGLE CLOUD OUTAGE HITS BANKS,NHS, BUSINESSES

Jamieson Lee Hill • 24 October 2026

Has Britain's digital economy become too dependent on a handful of cloud providers

By Jamieson Lee Hill, Resident B2B Technology Writer

A power failure at a London data centre on Tuesday 20 October 2026 disrupted UK banking, business and public services. It raised concerns about Britain's dependence on a handful of major cloud providers and the damage an outage can do to local businesses and organisations.

Within hours of the data centre power failure, banking customers were struggling to access their money, businesses were losing sales and court hearings were being disrupted.

Google Cloud experienced a major outage affecting its London infrastructure. Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC were some of the financial institutions reporting problems.

Delivery companies, public services and smaller businesses were also hit and incurred financial losses as they couldn’t fulfil orders with their systems down. By Tuesday afternoon, services were recovering, and Google subsequently confirmed that the incident had been resolved.

The Google outage raises an important question:

Has Britain's digital economy become too dependent on a handful of cloud providers?

What Caused the Google Cloud Outage?

Google confirmed it originated from a power event at a third-party facility supporting its London cloud region, known as europe-west2. It hasn’t yet identified the name of the data centre.

The problem affected an availability zone called europe-west2-b, part of the infrastructure designed to distribute workloads and improve cloud reliability.

According to Google, the incident caused:

Increased errors across affected cloud services.
Intermittent network failures.
Disruption to businesses relying on Google's London infrastructure.

Google later confirmed that services had been restored and promised a detailed technical analysis.

Source: Google Cloud Service Health.

Which UK Services Were Affected?

The disruption impacted several sectors, including:

Banking: Revolut reported problems with card payments and cash withdrawals. Lloyds and HSBC customers also experienced difficulties.
Public services: HM Courts and Tribunals Service had problems with its remote hearing platform.
Delivery and retail: Downdetector recorded issues involving DPD, Royal Mail and Rightmove.
Healthcare: Users had difficulties involving NHS England services.

Source: Reuters, 20 October 2026.

UK Small Businesses Count the Cost

Smaller businesses were also seriously disrupted by the Google outage. The BBC interviewed The Veg Box Company, a family-run business in Preston.

The company reported three immediate problems:

Orders: Staff could not access their website to process customer orders.
Deliveries: Problems with DPD prevented parcel collections from being arranged.
Sales: Customers could not access the website to place new orders.

Guy Baybutt, of Veg Box Company, said, "Disruptions like this can have serious financial consequences. It was incredibly frustrating that a technical failure completely outside our control brought so much of our business to a standstill, affecting not just us but also the customers who rely on our deliveries,".

The outage led to financial losses for small businesses unable to access or fulfil orders.

Source: BBC News, 20 October 2026.

Are We Too Dependent on Cloud Giants?

This latest comes exactly one year after a major Amazon Web Services (AWS) failure in 2025 that disrupted more than 1,000 websites and digital services worldwide.

Although the technical causes differed, both incidents exposed the risks of relying heavily on a small number of cloud providers. Google Cloud, AWS and Microsoft Azure support critical services across banking, gaming, education, e-commerce and communications.

Speaking to The Guardian, internet infrastructure expert Michał Woźniak warned:

"Hyperscalers have become too big to not fail."

The overall concern is not that cloud computing is inherently unreliable. It is the fact that when thousands of organisations depend on shared infrastructure like Google Cloud, AWS or Microsoft, a single failure can have widespread consequences.

UK Regulators Demand Greater Resilience

In July 2026, the UK placed Google Cloud, Microsoft, AWS and Oracle under direct regulatory oversight as critical third-party suppliers to the financial sector. The UK government basically gave financial regulators greater powers to monitor these four major cloud providers. So many banks now depend on their technology.

For SMEs, it is equally important to understand infrastructure dependencies and prepare for unexpected disruption like Tuesday’s outage.

Source: Reuters, 20 October 2026.

IP House: Resilient Colocation for SMEs

The Google outage reinforces concerns we previously explored in two articles:

Lessons From Recent Banking Outages (August 2026)
Why Digital Bank Outages Happen? (July 2026)

Both articles highlight the importance of business continuity, disaster recovery and resilient infrastructure. IP House London provides data centre colocation services for SMEs seeking greater control over their IT infrastructure.

Colocation allows businesses to house their servers in a professionally managed data centre, supporting:

Resilient power, cooling and connectivity.
Greater control over dedicated infrastructure.
Hybrid cloud and colocation strategies.
Business continuity and disaster recovery.

Although colocation cannot eliminate every outage, it can help businesses reduce selected dependencies and build more resilient systems.

Could your business withstand several hours of unexpected downtime?

Contact IP House to explore colocation solutions that protect your business from a digital outage.

About the Author

Jamieson Lee Hill has been IP House’s Resident B2B Technology Writer since 2022, writing about data centre colocation across its core Gaming, EdTech and FinTech sectors. While not a data centre technician, his role is to research complex colocation and digital infrastructure topics and explain them clearly to non-technical readers.

A certified college lecturer and teacher with 27 years of experience, Jamieson holds a DMS in Business Management, a Certificate in Education and Cambridge DELTA, alongside 11 DigitalMarketer certifications, including SEO. He also undertakes professional development in cybersecurity, workplace AI, EEAT, AIO and AEO, and has certifications in video game design and storywriting.

Jamieson has run UK limited companies since 2012, and he has written educational books for RET International and Ixion College, including a 600+ page Diploma course book. He has also been editor for 3 books: The Adventures of Tom Sharpe books 1 and 2 by Peter Drinkwater and Life’s A Game by Mev Dinc.

A former teacher trainer and curriculum manager, he has designed courses for organisations including Sainsbury’s, Poundland, Swissport, Staffline and UK colleges. Since 2017, he has also taught and developed curricula for More Than English Summer School in Business Studies, Global Leadership, Creative Writing and University Preparation.