Google Cloud Outage Hits London Region, Disrupts Multiple Services

Google Cloud is investigating a disruption affecting multiple services in its London region, europe-west2. The company’s official service health notice reports elevated errors and intermittent network failures across the region. The incident began at 11:08 p.m. Pacific time on Monday, October 19, which was 7:08 a.m. in London on Tuesday, October 20.

The affected list spans core infrastructure as well as databases and application services. Google lists Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, BigQuery, Firestore, Pub/Sub and Virtual Private Cloud among the products touched by the incident. That does not mean every customer using those products is offline. The scope and severity can differ by workload and location, but the breadth of the list explains why a regional failure can be felt across many unrelated applications.

In its latest update at the time of writing, Google said engineers were still investigating. It had not published a root cause or a firm recovery time. The company specifically noted that Looker Studio was not affected. Where feasible, it suggested customers move impacted workloads to another available zone or region. Such a move may not be quick for services that depend on regional data, capacity or tightly connected systems.

What users and businesses should know

A cloud-region disruption can show up as failed logins, unavailable app functions, delayed jobs or intermittent errors rather than one uniform outage page. Services built on Google Cloud may have their own status pages and recovery timelines, even after the underlying provider begins restoring operations. The official Google Cloud incident page is the best source for whether this particular London-region issue remains active.

Revolut’s own status page separately reports service problems during the disruption. Companies should be careful about attributing every contemporaneous website or banking failure to Google Cloud without confirmation from the affected provider. Downdetector spikes show that users are having trouble; they do not establish the technical cause.

For organisations running critical systems in a single location, the incident is a reminder of the difference between using a cloud provider and designing for a cloud failure. Distributing a workload across zones or regions can reduce exposure, but it also adds cost and operational complexity. TechBooky has previously examined the cost of cloud dependence during a Microsoft 365 disruption; the same resilience question applies here, without implying the two incidents share a cause.

This is a developing story. Google has confirmed the London-region disruption and said its engineering team is investigating. We will update the report when the company provides a verified cause, clearer customer impact or a resolution notice.