Power disruption in Google’s London zone affects Western European services
A power event in Google Cloud’s London region disrupted a range of online services for customers across Western Europe, including products used by banks, retailers and delivery firms. The incident shows how a failure in one cloud zone can ripple through organisations that rely on its infrastructure and connected services.
The outage began at 0608 UTC in europe-west2-b, one of three availability zones in the London region. Google said the power event had been mitigated and, at 1158 UTC, tentatively expected recovery to be completed by 1300 UTC; customers might still be unable to create new workloads. A computer science lecturer estimated that 38 services were affected and said resilience depends on planning for regional failures, including multi-region deployments and tested recovery procedures.
- A power event disrupted Google Cloud’s London zone.
- The outage affected services used by major organisations.
- Google tentatively expected recovery by 1300 UTC.
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Google Cloud is a service that lets organisations run software and store data on Google’s computers, rather than managing all the infrastructure themselves. Its London region is split into separate zones, designed to keep services running if one part has a problem.
Banks, retailers and delivery firms may use Google Cloud directly or rely on other services hosted on it. Disruption in one zone can therefore affect several organisations, while the extent depends on how they have arranged backup systems and recovery plans.
Cloud providers and their customers share responsibility for keeping services available. Customers can reduce the impact of a local failure by preparing to run workloads in other zones or regions and testing how they would recover.
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Originally published by The Register as “Google Cloud says a ‘power event’ caused today’s outage”.