Google Cloud cited a power disruption as the cause of an outage affecting multiple services in its London region on October 20, 2026. The incident began at 0608 UTC when the europe-west2-b availability zone experienced a power event, triggering failures across several products including BigQuery Data Transfer Service, Cloud Filestore, Cloud Run, App Engine, NetApp Volumes, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Managed Apache Kafka.

By 1158 UTC, the company indicated recovery was tentatively expected by 1300 UTC, with a follow-up update scheduled at that time. Services for customers such as Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Royal Mail, Rightmove, DPD, BT, Screwfix, and Revolut were impacted. Google noted that while existing workloads were being restored, new workload creation might remain restricted during the recovery process.

Dr. Amro Al-Said Ahmad, a computer science lecturer at Keele University, observed that the outage underscored the interdependence of modern cloud ecosystems. Failures in a single region can cascade across digital supply chains, affecting authentication systems, payment platforms, and SaaS tools that rely on underlying infrastructure. He emphasized that resilience requires proactive design for regional failures, including multi-region deployments and disaster recovery testing.

A subsequent update at 14.03 UTC confirmed that most services had been restored, though a small number of customers continued to experience issues. Google stated it would publish a full analysis following its internal investigation and would not provide further updates through the status page. The event reignited discussions about the fragility of centralized cloud architectures and the importance of architectural resilience beyond basic cloud migration.