A power incident at a Google data center in London led to several hours of disruption for cloud customers, impacting banks, courts and other enterprises.

A sudden power failure at Google’s London data centre caused a multi‑hour outage that rippled across a range of Google Cloud services, leaving banks, courts and other enterprises scrambling for alternatives.

What happened at the London site

The incident began when an unexpected loss of electricity knocked out critical infrastructure at the facility. Engineers worked to restore power and bring systems back online, but the complexity of the cloud environment meant services remained degraded for several hours.

Services that felt the impact

  • Google Compute Engine instances experienced intermittent connectivity
  • BigQuery query processing slowed or timed out
  • Google Kubernetes Engine clusters reported node failures
  • Cloud Storage uploads and downloads were delayed

Financial institutions reported transaction delays, while several UK courts experienced temporary disruptions to their digital filing systems. Other enterprise customers noted that internal applications hosted on the platform were unavailable for up to four hours.

Google’s response and remediation

Google’s incident response team issued updates through the Google Cloud Status Dashboard, outlining the scope of the outage and the steps being taken to restore full functionality. By early afternoon, power had been restored and most services were back to normal, though some customers continued to experience residual latency.

For a deeper look at how the outage unfolded, see the Infrastructure section on uxc.news, which tracks similar incidents across the industry.

Read the original report in Silicon coverage of Google Cloud outage.

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