IT center in London affected: Cloud disruption at Google paralyzes banks

A major outage of Google Cloud services in Great Britain has led to massive technical disruptions in Europe - with consequences for bank customers. According to the company and those affected, infrastructure in the London region was affected, with widespread repercussions for users beyond the UK's borders.

The disruptions affected, among other things, digital payment transactions and account services from financial service providers such as the digital bank Revolut. Services were also affected at Bank ING. However, this was not due to the disruption at Google, said a spokesman. “All of our services are now fully available to our customers again.” We regret the restrictions for customers and apologize for the inconvenience caused.

Users of other banking apps in various European countries complained about temporary restrictions on app access and transactions. Numerous other online services, websites and business applications that rely on Google's cloud infrastructure also experienced problems.

The Downdetector portal, which allows users to report disruptions, said it had received hundreds of reports of problems at banks HSBC and Lloyds Bank, as well as property websites Rightmove and British postal company Royal Mail.

Google acknowledged the technical difficulties via its status pages and was working hard to fix the error. The exact extent of the international damage and the cause of the outage in the London data center zone are being further analyzed.