Google Cloud said the disruption occurred at a third-party facility within its europe-west2 cloud region, causing widespread service failures across UK banks, government systems and businesses, BBC News reported. The company later confirmed the disruption had been resolved and said it would publish an analysis of the event to its service health dashboard once its internal investigation was complete.
Problems appeared to peak at around 9am and were largely resolved by mid-afternoon, based on reports submitted to Downdetector. The disruption started shortly after 6am UK time. Google Cloud said its engineering team was continuing to work on restoring service for a small number of remaining affected customers after the issue was largely resolved.
Revolut, Lloyds Bank and HSBC were among UK banking services that confirmed disruption, with a platform outage monitor receiving more than 1,500 Revolut problem reports in the period just after 08:00 BST. Online banking users at Halifax and Bank of Scotland, along with Lloyds Bank, reported problems with certain services.
Lloyds said it understood the root issues had been resolved and expected all services to return to normal soon, without confirming the cause of its own disruptions. Revolut said all customer money and data were safe throughout the disruption and that services had been fully restored.
The HM Courts and Tribunals Service reported an issue with the Cloud Video Platform used for remote hearings, with court live streams including that of the trial of Russell Brand reportedly disrupted. Patients also reported temporary issues with the NHS app. Among the platforms with reported disruptions were Royal Mail, DPD and e-bike rental service Forest.
Cloud computing providers including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud offer their services through regional facilities around the world, referred to as regions, which contain multiple smaller data centre zones. Up to 60% of UK government infrastructure is hosted on cloud services, mostly from Amazon, Microsoft and Google, The Guardian reported. A prior AWS cloud site outage, on the same date one year earlier, took more than 1,000 sites offline for several hours.
Michał Wozniak, an internet infrastructure expert, told The Guardian the outage was a reminder of increasing concentration of vital services on the infrastructure of a small number of large companies, and said it was unreasonable for outages at a handful of large companies to repeatedly cause public institutions or large portions of the digital economy to stop working. Prof Feng Li, associate dean for research and innovation at Bayes Business School, said the outage illustrated how deeply economies depend on a small number of cloud providers.
Businesses relying on Google Cloud's europe-west2 region for website hosting, order processing or payment systems faced service interruptions during the outage. Small businesses with perishable or time-sensitive stock faced the risk of lost sales and delayed deliveries while services were unavailable.
Reporting: ABC News, BBC, The Guardian
Written by Pick & Scroll News from the reporting and documents linked above.
