Google Cloud outage in London since 11am PKT knocks out Revolut card payments and ATMs

Google Cloud's London region, europe-west2, has been failing since 11:08am Pakistan time on Tuesday 20 October (23:08 Pacific time on Monday), and the fallout has spread to banking apps used by millions in Britain, including Revolut. By 3:48pm PKT, Google's Service Health page still listed the incident as active, with 31 products affected and no fix posted.

Google said multiple services were seeing "elevated errors and intermittent network failures" in the London region. Its only advice so far is for customers to move affected workloads to another region or zone if they can.

Which services are down in the Google Cloud London outage

The list on Google's status page covers most of the building blocks companies run on, which explains why the trouble reached so many apps at once:

• Compute and containers: Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run, App Engine
• Databases: Cloud SQL, Spanner, Bigtable, Firestore, AlloyDB, Memorystore
• Storage and data: Cloud Storage, Persistent Disk, BigQuery, Dataflow, Pub/Sub
• Networking: Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and Apigee

Looker Studio is not affected, Google said in its 2:24pm PKT update.

Revolut, Lloyds, HSBC and others hit

Revolut said on X that it was "experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services" and that "all our customers' money and data are safe." Its status page showed card payments and ATM withdrawals as unavailable or partly unavailable, Reuters reported (carried by ARY News). A person familiar with the matter told Reuters the Revolut outage was linked to the Google Cloud failure; neither company has confirmed that publicly.

More than 1,500 people reported Revolut problems on Downdetector on Tuesday morning, and users also reported trouble with Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Royal Mail, DPD and Rightmove, the Press Association reported. Google told PA: "We apologise to all who are affected by the disruption." ING in Germany separately reported login problems with its banking app, Reuters said, without tying them to Google.

What it means for Pakistanis in the UK

Revolut does not operate in Pakistan, but many British Pakistanis and Pakistani students in the UK use it and the big high-street banks to pay bills and send money home. If you were planning a transfer today:

1. Do not repeat a failed payment straight away. Check your transaction history first, so a payment is not sent twice once services return.
2. Use another route if the money is urgent, such as a different bank or a money transfer service that is working.
3. Check the rate before you send: today's pound rate is on our GBP to PKR page, and the currency converter works out what your family receives in rupees.

Businesses in Pakistan that host apps in Google's London region (some fintechs and software exporters with UK clients do) should check their own dashboards and Google's failover advice.

What happens next

Google has not said what caused the failure or when it expects to fix it. It posts updates on the incident page roughly every hour and a half; we will update this story when service is restored.