Revolut Services Restored After Google Cloud Outage Hits UK Banks and Public Services

Digital bank Revolut restored its services shortly after 1:52 PM EDT (5:52 PM UTC) on October 20, 2026, after a Google Cloud outage caused widespread disruption to its financial services[4][11][15].

The outage impacted millions of customers across Ireland and the UK, preventing access to banking apps, card payments, and transfers, and also affected operations at other major banks, delivery services, and public sector platforms[1][2][3][5].

What the records show

Google Cloud confirmed that a "power event" caused an outage within its "europe-west2-b" zone, located in London, which knocked services offline early on Tuesday morning and led to intermittent network failures[1][3][5][8]. This disruption affected approximately 30 to 36 cloud-hosted services[3]. Revolut explicitly linked its service disruption to this Google Cloud incident, stating that customers may have experienced temporary issues due to it[4][11]. Financial regulators in the UK, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), confirmed they were in contact with Google to gather more information about the outage[5][7][12].

The timeline

The problems began early on Tuesday morning, October 20, 2026, with Downdetector recording a spike in reports between 7 AM and 8 AM local time[1]. Cisco ThousandEyes detected the outage affecting Google Cloud's europe-west2 (London) region starting at approximately 06:10 UTC[9][14]. Google acknowledged the elevated errors and intermittent network failures in its London region just after 7 AM local time[6]. Services began to recover from approximately 11:30 UTC, according to ThousandEyes, with Google stating it was seeing recovery of services across most of the region shortly after 1 PM London time[5][6][9][14]. Google later declared the incident fully resolved at around 14:00 UTC[9][14]. Revolut confirmed that all its services were restored by 13:52 EDT (17:52 UTC)[4][11][15].

What changed and for whom

Millions of Revolut customers in Ireland and the UK were unable to log in to the app, transfer funds, make card payments, or withdraw cash[1][2][5]. The disruption extended beyond Revolut, impacting users of Lloyds Bank, HSBC, and Halifax, who also reported issues with logging into banking apps and online services[1][3][5]. Essential public services and delivery operations were also affected; DPD, the NHS, and the courts video platform used throughout the UK experienced disruptions[1][3][5].

What the subject has said publicly

Revolut stated, "Due to a recent Google Cloud outage, customers may have experienced temporary service disruption on the Revolut app today"[4][11]. The company confirmed that "The issue has now been fixed, and services are now restored" and reassured customers that "All our customers' money and data is safe, and has remained safe throughout this incident"[4][11]. Google publicly acknowledged the problem, stating that a "power event" caused the outage in its London data center[1][3][5][8]. A Google spokesperson stated, "The power event is mitigated," and that the issue with impacted products had been reduced for most affected users[1].

What we could not confirm

PrimaryBrief could not confirm the specific details of the power event that caused the Google Cloud outage. The precise number of individual customers affected across all disrupted services was also not available.