How does an unexplained Google Cloud London outage cause cascading failures for fintech Revolut?
A widespread outage in the europe-west2 region took down dozens of services, causing cascading failures for dependent clients including fintech Revolut.
Key points
- Google Cloud services in the London region began failing at 07:08 UK time on Tuesday.
- Revolut experienced app and payment disruptions starting around 08:00 UK time.
- Google engineers have not yet identified the root cause of the incident.
A failure across dozens of Google Cloud products in the London data centre region disrupted operations for firms hosting systems there. The incident began at 07:08 UK time in the europe-west2 region, according to Google’s service health page. Customers reported increased errors and intermittent network faults. Google engineers stated they were still investigating the cause of the disruption.
Root cause
Google has not confirmed the specific technical trigger for the outage. The company’s service health page indicates that engineers are actively looking for the cause. No patch or fix has been confirmed yet. Google apologized for the disruption and advised customers to move work to other zones or regions if possible. The next status update was scheduled for noon UK time.
Attack path
This event was an operational outage, not a cyberattack. There is no evidence of unauthorized access or exploitation. The disruption stemmed from a failure within Google’s infrastructure in the London region. The failure impacted multiple products simultaneously, including Compute Engine and Cloud Storage. This caused dependent services to become unavailable.
Affected versions
The outage impacted the entire europe-west2 region, affecting specific products regardless of version. Google listed 36 affected products. These included Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage and BigQuery. No specific software versions were cited as vulnerable or excluded from the incident. The impact was regional rather than version-specific.
Mitigation
Google advised customers to move their workloads to another zone or region if they could. This step aims to restore service availability while engineers investigate the root cause. No software update or patch was provided. Organizations should monitor their own service status pages and Google’s health dashboard for further information on restoration timelines.
What it means for organisations
Operations teams should verify whether critical systems depend on single-region cloud providers. Review disaster recovery plans to ensure failover capabilities to alternate regions. Communicate clearly with stakeholders about potential service degradation. Check supplier contracts for uptime guarantees and incident response obligations. Ensure internal monitoring alerts trigger when upstream providers report issues. Coordinate with IT and security teams to assess exposure.
What to do and how to stay safe: Google Cloud
- Check if your services run in the affected cloud region and assess current status.
- Verify that failover mechanisms to other regions are functional and tested.
- Monitor vendor status pages for updates on restoration and root cause.
- Review internal incident response plans for cloud provider outages.
Step-by-step guide: Identity and Access Management System: How It Controls Cloud Access
General security guidance from the CloudSec Press newsroom. It is not confirmed advice from the organisations named in this story.
Frequently asked questions
When did the Google Cloud outage start?
The problems began at 07:08 UK time in the europe-west2 London region on Tuesday morning.
Was Revolut's outage caused by the Google Cloud issue?
A person familiar with the matter told Reuters that Revolut’s outage was related to the Google Cloud disruption.
Which Google services were affected?
Google listed 36 affected products, including Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage and BigQuery.
