A Google cloud outage halts banks and services across Europe

A fault in Google’s cloud systems caused disruption to banks, payment services and everyday applications in several European countries on the morning of Tuesday, October 20. The first reports in the United Kingdom came in shortly after 7am, and within a short time access difficulties spread to other countries on the continent.

The problem affected the europe-west2 region of Google Cloud’s infrastructure, the portion of the network associated with the London data center on which many companies rely for the operation of their digital services. When that region stops responding correctly, the effect does not remain confined to Google: it spreads to all customers who route their applications through it, from banks to logistics.

The consequences were felt in the sectors most sensitive to operational continuity. Problems were reported for banks and payment systems, as well as for delivery services, websites and applications dependent on the affected infrastructure. For several hours, users and businesses in multiple European countries found transactions failing to complete or pages failing to load, affecting everyday operations that normally occur without users even noticing.

For its part, Google confirmed the anomaly, reporting an increase in errors and intermittent network outages, without immediately providing a full picture of the causes or a definite time for full restoration of service. The company’s initial communication was limited to acknowledging the ongoing disruption in the European region, leaving customers and observers for hours without precise indications on resolution times.

An account by the Bbc, picked up in Italy by the monitoring site Rss Orange, attributes the fault to an electrical issue at the root of the outage, as communicated by Google itself. This is, at this stage, the most detailed explanation circulated regarding the technical cause of the incident, although it does not replace an official and complete account from the company.

The episode has renewed attention on independent network outage monitoring reports, the same tools cited by the Italian press to follow the evolving situation in real time, in the absence of timely and detailed official statements from the service provider.

At the time of this article’s publication, Google had not released an overall assessment of how many companies and users were affected by the outage in the europe-west2 region, nor a precise time for full restoration of service.