A severe power outage at a data centre operated by technology group Google in London has led to noticeable disruptions in the British property sector and across several major banks. The incident affected the Europe-West2 site, a central hub for cloud services in the United Kingdom. The failure left several digital platforms and financial service providers with limited accessibility for a period.
In the property sector, the outage hit the portal Rightmove in particular. Users and estate agents faced problems with services requiring prior login. The platform recorded failures in account management and personalised property search functions, temporarily hampering daily agency operations.
Disruptions at leading financial institutions
Alongside the leading British property portal, several major financial institutions also registered significant disruptions to their operational processes. The affected institutions included traditional high-street lenders such as Lloyds, Halifax, RBS and HSBC. In addition, neobank Revolut reported disruptions across its systems, which were traced back to the problems in Google Cloud's infrastructure.
For customers and market participants, the technical difficulties created noticeable hurdles in routine payment processing and access to online banking services. Although the core systems of these institutions are designed with redundancy in mind, the failure at the London hub led to delays and error messages during transactions and account balance checks.
Overview of affected institutions
- —Rightmove: Outages in secure and registered user services
- —Lloyds and Halifax: Restrictions in electronic banking operations
- —RBS and HSBC: Disruptions to digital interfaces and banking services
- —Revolut: Impairments to mobile financial applications
The incident highlights the pronounced dependence of modern property intermediaries and financial service providers on external cloud vendors. Property portals and banking institutions run mission-critical processes via outsourced server facilities. When a power failure occurs at a central physical location like Europe-West2, the operational fallout can affect broad swathes of the market simultaneously and severely slow digital business activity.
