Google Cloud London Outage Hits UK Banks: What Regulators Said and What SaaS Buyers Should Check

The outage matters beyond banking because it tests new critical third-party rules in both the UK and the EU. Google said the cause was a power event at a third-party facility, and it had not yet published its analysis in the sources we reviewed.

Facts below come from Reuters (carried by The Star, October 21, 2026) and City AM (October 20, 2026). Details may change as Google and regulators publish more.

What happened on October 20

On Tuesday, October 20, 2026, a Google Cloud disruption in the europe-west2 (London) region left customers of several UK and European financial services without key functions for several hours, according to Reuters reporting carried by The Star.

• Revolut, with around 13 million UK customers, saw logins, card payments and cash withdrawals disrupted, and said customer funds and data remained safe.
• Lloyds and HSBC were also affected, and City AM reported problems at Barclays as well.
• Google attributed the disruption to a "power event" at a third-party facility in the region and said services were restored, with an analysis to follow on its public status dashboard.
• City AM said Downdetector showed a spike around 8am, with more than 1,500 Revolut reports, and that Rightmove, Royal Mail and NHS England also saw spikes.

Google had not published its analysis in the sources reviewed for this article, so the root cause beyond the "power event" description remains unconfirmed.

How regulators responded

Regulators on both sides of the Channel moved within a day. The UK Financial Conduct Authority said it was engaging with Google and affected firms, while the European Banking Authority said it was in contact with Google Cloud to assess the impact on EU financial entities.

• Treasury Committee chair Dame Meg Hillier wrote to Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey and FCA chief Nikhil Rathi, asking how they will use their powers, with an initial response requested by Wednesday, November 4 and a full response in three months, per City AM.
• The EBA stressed that designating a provider as critical does not transfer incident-management responsibility away from that provider, or relieve financial firms of their own obligations.
• Reuters noted the EU designated 19 technology firms as critical third-party providers last year, Britain designated four cloud providers, and Google Cloud falls under both frameworks.

City AM reported that the FCA and Bank of England gained enhanced powers over the UK arms of major cloud providers in July, following an AWS outage in October 2025.

Why it matters for B2B SaaS buyers

The incident shows that a single-region dependency can reach customers many layers away. A SaaS product may run on one cloud region, and your own critical workflow may depend on that vendor, so one power event can stop billing, identity or support tools without warning.

It also shows where accountability lands. As the EBA statement made clear, regulated firms keep responsibility for the services they deliver even when a provider fails, and that logic applies to any company with customer commitments, not only banks.

What IT and procurement teams should do now

Treat this as a prompt to review concentration risk. Start with your most critical SaaS tools, ask where they run, and check whether vendors can fail over to another region or provider within the recovery times your business needs.

• List critical SaaS vendors and ask which cloud and region host them.
• Request each vendor's recovery time and recovery point objectives, plus its last tested failover date.
• Add outage clauses, status-page commitments and incident notification windows to contracts.
• Run a tabletop exercise for a half-day loss of your payment, identity and support tools.
• Set up independent monitoring so you detect vendor outages before customers report them.

Compare monitoring options in our Application Performance Management Software category, review backup and failover tools in Backup & Recovery Software, and browse Cloud Management Software for multi-cloud visibility. Related context is in our piece on cloud capacity risk for SaaS buyers. Teams using Google infrastructure can follow incident updates through Google Cloud and its status dashboard.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did the Google Cloud outage affect only banks?
No. City AM reported that Downdetector also showed spikes for Rightmove, Royal Mail and NHS England on October 20, 2026. Banks drew regulator attention because of financial stability rules, but any business using the region could be affected.

What should we ask SaaS vendors after a cloud outage?
Ask which cloud provider and region host your service, how failover works, the recovery time and recovery point objectives, when failover was last tested, and how quickly the vendor notifies customers of incidents.

Who is responsible when a cloud provider fails?
The provider is responsible for resolving its incident, but the European Banking Authority said critical-provider designation does not relieve financial firms of their own obligations. Contracts, resilience planning and monitoring should reflect that shared responsibility.