Technology · NEWS EXPLAINER
Google Cloud’s London outage disrupts Revolut payments and withdrawals — what users should know
The europe-west2 incident caused elevated errors across multiple cloud products. Revolut listed 30 UK services as partially unavailable, while saying customer money and data remained safe.
Google Cloud reported elevated errors and intermittent network failures across multiple services in its London-based europe-west2 region. The incident began at 23:08 PDT on October 19, or 06:08 UTC on October 20, and was still under investigation when this report was prepared.
Revolut’s UK status page showed 30 functions partially unavailable, including sign-in, card payments, transfers and ATM withdrawals. Revolut said customer money and data remained safe; Reuters reported that a person familiar with the matter linked the disruption to the Google Cloud incident.
The incident is regional, but the product list is broad
Google Cloud said the disruption was affecting europe-west2, its London region, with elevated errors and intermittent network failures. Its incident log listed services across compute, storage, databases, networking and managed platforms, including Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Cloud Run, Google Kubernetes Engine and VPC. The notice did not describe a global Google Cloud outage.
Revolut customers saw payment and account-access failures
Revolut’s UK status page showed 30 functions partially unavailable, including sign-in, card payments, transfers and ATM withdrawals. Reuters reported that most services were unavailable or partly unavailable, while Revolut said customer money and data remained safe. That safety statement does not mean every payment or withdrawal was processing normally.
The cloud link is reported, not independently proven by every status page
A person familiar with the matter told Reuters that Revolut’s disruption was related to the Google Cloud incident. Google’s public log confirms the London-region failure and Revolut publicly uses Google Cloud, but Revolut’s status page itself did not name a root cause. This report therefore attributes the link rather than presenting it as Revolut’s own technical finding.
Google offered a regional migration workaround where feasible
Google’s 02:24 PDT update said affected customers could try moving impacted workloads to another available zone or region if feasible. That is guidance for cloud operators, not a step individual Revolut customers can perform. For banking users, the practical action is to check Revolut’s status page, avoid repeatedly retrying time-sensitive transactions and keep records of failed attempts.
The incident was still under investigation at publication time
Google listed the incident start as 23:08 PDT on October 19, equivalent to 06:08 UTC on October 20, and said engineers were continuing to investigate. Its 02:24 PDT update promised more information by 04:00 PDT. Revolut still showed partial unavailability when this report was prepared, so recovery claims should be checked against the live status pages rather than assumed.
