UK banking and public healthcare sites disrupted due to Google Cloud failure (comprehensive)

Recovery after 6 hours of ‘power problem’… “Concerns of global dependence on a small number of large corporations increase”

(London = Yonhap News) Correspondent Kim Ji-yeon = On the 20th (local time), a failure occurred in Google Cloud, preventing several websites, including British financial, public health, and postal services, from operating normally for several hours.

According to Reuters, AP, and AFP, Google announced this morning that "multiple Google Cloud services are experiencing increased errors and intermittent network failures in the 'Europe-West 2' zone" and that "our technology team is continuing to investigate." ‘Europe-West 2’ refers to a data center in London.

Google then announced again that the failure occurred due to a 'power problem', saying that most of its services had been restored this afternoon.

The Google Cloud service problem continued for about 6 hours, from 7:08 a.m. to 1:10 p.m. that day.

According to Downdetector, an online service failure tracking service, since this morning, reports of problems have been received from Lloyd's Bank of England, HSBC Bank, real estate brokerage website 'Rightmove', delivery company DPD, postal service Royal Mail, and public health service (NHS) England.

British digital bank Revolut said it had experienced disruptions to several services. Users reported that card payments and cash withdrawals were not possible.

Lloyd's said that the fundamental problem has been resolved and that the service will soon return to normal. Royal Mail said it was aware of some of the issues but that postal delivery operations were not affected.

Most of the problems occurred in London, but countries outside the UK that rely on London-based infrastructure were also said to have been affected.

This comes amid growing concerns around the world about increased dependence on large cloud providers, known as hyperscalers. Google is one of the top three global cloud service providers along with Amazon and Microsoft (MS).

Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Surrey, told AFP that regional infrastructure failures could have serious knock-on effects at a time when many companies rely on a small number of cloud service providers. The problem could be further compounded by the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, which is driving demand for hyperscalers.