Google Cloud outage disrupts Revolut, Halifax and other services

A disruption in Google Cloud’s London region knocked services offline or made them unreliable for several hours, affecting Revolut, Halifax and other organizations that use the company’s computing infrastructure. Google said a power-related incident was behind the problem and later said service had been restored for most customers. The episode is a useful reminder of how cloud computing works: banks and apps may look independent to customers, but many rely on the same behind-the-scenes data centers to run payments, websites and internal systems. That efficiency can make outages spread quickly across otherwise unrelated services, even when the companies themselves have not suffered a failure.