Google Cloud outage affects almost all banking and other operations in Europe

paweladamczuk 373 points 185 comments October 20, 2026
www.neowin.net · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (20 comments)

paweladamczuk

For me it was Revolut. No access to my main account, no withdrawals, no card payments since the morning. App doesn't work, there's no phone number to call, nobody to talk to. Dark side of neobanking, I guess.

gentlerain

Countries talking about AI sovereignty, when they forgot compute sovereignty

gadders

>>Google cloud outage takes down HSBC, Revolut, Bank of Scotland, Llyods, Equifax, more You will probably have issues logging into Llyods even when the cloud is back up.

bcvvvy

I bank with HSBC. Everything is up and working. A lot of the information people are leveraging here comes from Downdetector which is mostly users reporting that stuff is down, not whether they are actually down. It's a really bad source.

nickcw

From Google's status page https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/Xs2XTHzAVC9YnafnPy... We are experiencing an issue with multiple services in europe-west2 beginning on Monday, 2026-10-19 23:08 PDT. Due to a power event we had suffered an outage within europe-west2-b zone. The power event is mitigated. Partial mitigation to infrastructure services will be observed within the next 30 minutes and the remaining services will be mitigated there after. So some kind of power failure happened to bring down one zone. Unfortunate, but this kind of stuff happens. That is why all the cloud providers have multiple zones, and I'm amazed the big companies reported as down weren't using multiple zones. (Also reporting the times in PDT is quite unhelpful for users of this zone who are likely based in the UK or EU)

misstuned

I couldn't unlock a shared city bike this morning on the Beryl system, probably the same outage.

rvz

Since there are no humans working on outages here is the test for superintelligence: Can someone ask Claude, Codex, Copilot, Antigravity, Devin to resolve this outage? No Googling or help from humans this time.

BlackRabbit1

Most likely it knocked out the "Ing" bank in Germany.

mistic92

Ah again London region :D

dangoodmanUT

At this point, the way I see it is: - There's AWS - There's Azure - There's everything else And I don't even use Azure, I just hear it's good (and they don't charge cross-AZ traffic)

diamondDrill

how can cloud inf go down? that was the main selling point, it makes no sense

gaiagraphia

It's a little worrying that banking with an institution from one of the world's financial capitals is so vulnerable. I would've thought London would've been priding itself on security, stability, safety, etc. Confidence in their systems is their bread and butter Afaik, even Russia and Ukraine aren't having such issues while dealing with data centres getting droned, lol. It's really quite poor performance.

nfrankel

Migrate to the Cloud, they said. It will be more resilient and less expensive, they said.

josefritzishere

Let me draw a line between this and the Ukrainian bombing of Russian Yandex data centers. This is a sign of structural vulnerability. If one power failure can take down more than 5 banks, what you are describing is a valuable target. It's ironic that the cloud services that promised to harden systems have delivered another layer of vulnerability.

bookofjoe

Ironic: yesterday X Money invited me to open an account — with a starting gift balance of $15. Deeper currents?

bpavuk

I wonder if it's somehow related to me having to re-sign into my account after clearing Google Play Services data just a few hours ago.

stymaar

Nobody has never been fired for using ~~IBM~~ ~~Oracle~~ Google.

Muromec

You can't hurt our mainframe running COBOL. Suck it zoomers!

bobbiechen

Anyone have a read on the implications for Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) compliance here? Google Cloud seems to be a critical third-party vendor for these financial institutions. The top penalties for DORA can be very expensive (% of worldwide revenue fines).

lucideer

Possibly the most surprising part of this is the extremely quiet reporting on it. I've not seen many news outlets pick it up, & even on HN - they were down for almost 8 hours & I didn't see even see this post hit the frontpage (it might have briefly at some stage). I guess service reliability is just no longer something we consider a big deal in today's tech landscape.

Semantic search powered by Rivestack pgvector
10,084 stories · 95,083 chunks indexed