Google Cloud said it had restored services following an outage at its London cloud region that disrupted UK businesses, including order processing and parcel bookings, BBC Business reported. The company said on Tuesday evening that the interruption arose from a power incident at a third-party facility within its europe-west2 region, and promised to publish an incident analysis on its service dashboard.
The disruption exposed practical difficulties for businesses dependent on connected sales and delivery systems. Guy Baybutt of The Veg Box Company, a family-run supplier of fresh fruit, vegetables and other produce to customers across the UK, told the BBC that the firm could not access its website to retrieve and process orders. It was also unable to arrange parcel collections through DPD’s system, putting orders scheduled for dispatch that day at risk of delay.
Customers could not use the company’s website to submit new orders either, resulting in lost sales, Baybutt said. He warned that interruptions could have significant financial effects on smaller businesses with limited capacity to absorb revenue losses, particularly when handling perishable goods requiring prompt delivery. Although the firm’s services subsequently recovered, he said the external technical failure had halted much of its activity. Users also reported difficulties with Royal Mail and DPD websites.
Banking services were affected alongside business platforms. Revolut confirmed that some services had been interrupted by the Google Cloud outage but said they were fully restored and that customers’ money and data had remained secure. Customers of Lloyds Bank, Halifax and Bank of Scotland also reported online banking problems. Lloyds did not confirm their cause, but later said it understood the underlying issues had been resolved and expected normal service to resume soon.
Google had earlier reported increased errors and intermittent network failures, later tracing the disruption to a power incident in its europe-west2-b zone. Feng Li, a professor at Bayes Business School, told the BBC that the episode illustrated businesses’ dependence on a small group of cloud providers. He said the cause of the power problem was not yet clear, while stressing the importance of recovery speed and workable alternatives for customers.