Google cloud outage exposes UK reliance on a few tech giants

A power failure at a datacentre in London disrupted banking apps, court hearings and the NHS app on Tuesday, renewing warnings that Britain depends too heavily on a handful of American technology companies.

The problem hit Google's europe-west2-b zone, one of more than a dozen "zones" the company runs in Europe to host data and services for its customers. Because Google Cloud runs operations for so many businesses, the effects spread quickly, mostly among UK firms.

According to reports on the website Downdetector, services affected included Royal Mail, Revolut, HSBC and Lloyds Bank. Problems appeared to peak at about 9am and had largely been resolved by mid-afternoon.

Banks and courts hit

Revolut confirmed "a service disruption affecting multiple services" but said "all our customers' money and data are safe". Lloyds said its app was working, but that it understood some people were "having issues with certain online services this morning".

HM Courts and Tribunals Service, which runs remote video hearings for courts across England and Wales, said it was "aware of an issue affecting Cloud Video Platform" and was "working with our technology partners to restore service". Some patients also reported temporary glitches on the NHS app.

A Google spokesperson said: "We have resolved a disruption to Google Cloud services at a third-party facility in our europe-west2 cloud region due to a power event. Services have been restored. We will update our public status dashboard with an analysis of the incident."

"Too big to not fail"

The outage came almost exactly a year after a far bigger failure at Amazon Web Services, which went down for nearly half a day and knocked out services around the world. That outage was later found to have been caused by a bug in automation software.

Michał Woźniak, an expert in internet infrastructure, said the latest disruption was a reminder of how much of the internet and of vital public services now runs on the systems of a few huge companies, known as the hyperscalers.

"Hyperscalers have become too big to not fail," he said. "But worse, they've become so deeply ingrained into the very fabric of our digital lives that switching away from them seems unimaginable."

"I am sure Google's engineers are doing everything they can to mitigate them, but it is unreasonable to have a handful of gigantic companies whose outages time and again cause public institutions or large swathes of the digital economy to stop working en masse," he said.

Government on the cloud

Up to 60 per cent of the UK government's infrastructure is thought to be hosted on cloud services, mostly provided by Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Critics have long argued that this leaves public services exposed not only to outages but to the decisions of companies based abroad.

Mr Woźniak also pointed to Google's statement earlier this year that three-quarters of its new code was now generated by artificial intelligence and approved by engineers, and questioned what effect that might have on the reliability of its services. Google has not linked Tuesday's disruption to AI.