A power outage on Tuesday, October 20, 2026, at a Google Cloud data center in London, specifically within the europe-west2-b availability zone, led to widespread disruption of critical UK services, affecting banking, court proceedings, and the NHS app. The incident, attributed by Google to a "power event," highlighted the vulnerability of national infrastructure due to its reliance on a limited number of major cloud providers. This event intensified concerns among UK and EU regulators regarding the financial sector's dependence on a concentrated set of external technology providers.

What the records show

The timeline

What changed and for whom

What Google has said publicly

What we could not confirm