We are experiencing an issue with multiple services in
europe-west2 beginning on Monday, 2026-10-19 23:08 PDT.
Due to a power event we had suffered an outage within
europe-west2-b zone. The power event is mitigated. Partial
mitigation to infrastructure services will be observed within the
next 30 minutes and the remaining services will be mitigated there
after.
So some kind of power failure happened to bring down one zone. Unfortunate, but this kind of stuff happens. That is why all the cloud providers have multiple zones, and I'm amazed the big companies reported as down weren't using multiple zones.
(Also reporting the times in PDT is quite unhelpful for users of this zone who are likely based in the UK or EU)
I'm not saying it's the case here, but sometimes the cloud providers themselves have inter-zone dependencies, or even inter-region dependencies that can cause outages in other zones and regions.
> I'm amazed the big companies reported as down weren't using multiple zones
Much as with backups - if you don't test them, they don't exist.
Everywhere I've worked has had multi-AZ infrastructure. I have never worked anywhere where the failure of an AZ has been simulated regularly, with second-order effects mapped out.
It's crazy. My main account is with Starling and I have a Lloyds account for a saving an account and some free cinema tickets. I don't think I've ever had an issue with Starling, it's great - Lloyds fails to sign in about 50% of the time consistently.
A lot of the information people are leveraging here comes from Downdetector which is mostly users reporting that stuff is down, not whether they are actually down. It's a really bad source.
It's a pretty good source ime (at least, massive spikes tend to correlate well with issues). Traditional organisations aren't as transparent as SF tech companies about service downtime. Plus, if the service isn't working for its users, I wouldn't say it's actually up.
For me it was Revolut. No access to my main account, no withdrawals, no card payments since the morning. App doesn't work, there's no phone number to call, nobody to talk to. Dark side of neobanking, I guess.
The stand-in system has a limited subset of features, i.e. no bells and whistles, but enough that you can get any actual banking done.
(Not an ad / I have no connection to Monzo, I just had some appreciation for a bank doing this properly as normally banking IT is a disaster. Plus the idea of keeping a separate codebase for almost an entire bank's functionality seems very invested.)
Starling also has a disaster recovery system across cloud providers, although it is implemented differently to Monzo's (I used to work there on multi-cloud).
Multi-cloud is really tough, tbh. It's easier said than done, especially if you care about data consistency at all.
I opened up a Revolut account a couple of years ago with the intention of switching my current account to it (i.e. wages going into it etc), but I got spooked after hearing that they weren't registered as a UK bank and thus subject to the various regulations and protections. I tried using Chase instead and have been happy with it so far.
I used to use Starling as my main and they were fine, until I started getting issues with random card declines due to "fraud prevention" and nobody to talk to. I switched to First Direct and like the peace of mind of having a human on the phone if needed (when I wanted to make a huge transfer for my house deposit it was nice to have!) and I still get perks like free foreign card transactions.
I think sovereignty might be the _cause_ of the banks' outages...
This is affecting companies that put everything into a single GCP region in the UK for their entire business - aka most likely British companies or government with a data sovereignty requirement.
The UK, at least, is big enough that you can have multiple regions within the same country. There's a lot of distance between Glasgow and London, for example. Maybe not enough if both are targeted with nuclear warheads, but at that point, we have bigger fish to fry I suspect.
Most European countries have enough space within the country to do that, and, for most things, except banking typically, hosting within the EU is enough, it doesn't have to be within your own country.
Microsoft Azure has two entirely seperate regions.
A "full function" one in/around London.
And a "tickbox" one for multi-region requirements near Cardiff.
The tickbox one has constant capacity constraints and a large number of Azure services aren't in it, but if you need to tick the "two regions and in country" requirement, you kinda/sorta can.
But considering what these sovereignty rules aim to achive, and as someone mentioned, that the problem may be due to companies relying on a single region provided by a hypersclaler due to data sovereignity rules.
Then redundancy has to be considered by both the company and the rulers.
From Google's status page https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/Xs2XTHzAVC9YnafnPy...
So some kind of power failure happened to bring down one zone. Unfortunate, but this kind of stuff happens. That is why all the cloud providers have multiple zones, and I'm amazed the big companies reported as down weren't using multiple zones.(Also reporting the times in PDT is quite unhelpful for users of this zone who are likely based in the UK or EU)
I'm not saying it's the case here, but sometimes the cloud providers themselves have inter-zone dependencies, or even inter-region dependencies that can cause outages in other zones and regions.
For example, AWS us-east-1 outages have caused global outages on multiple occasions, such as https://www.networkworld.com/article/4168878/aws-hit-by-us-e...
> I'm amazed the big companies reported as down weren't using multiple zones
Much as with backups - if you don't test them, they don't exist.
Everywhere I've worked has had multi-AZ infrastructure. I have never worked anywhere where the failure of an AZ has been simulated regularly, with second-order effects mapped out.
I know some banks out-sourced most of its infrastructure to external operators, and some operator I worked with didn't seem competent.
how can cloud inf go down? that was the main selling point, it makes no sense
>>Google cloud outage takes down HSBC, Revolut, Bank of Scotland, Llyods, Equifax, more
You will probably have issues logging into Llyods even when the cloud is back up.
It's crazy. My main account is with Starling and I have a Lloyds account for a saving an account and some free cinema tickets. I don't think I've ever had an issue with Starling, it's great - Lloyds fails to sign in about 50% of the time consistently.
cannot agree more
I bank with HSBC. Everything is up and working.
A lot of the information people are leveraging here comes from Downdetector which is mostly users reporting that stuff is down, not whether they are actually down. It's a really bad source.
It's a pretty good source ime (at least, massive spikes tend to correlate well with issues). Traditional organisations aren't as transparent as SF tech companies about service downtime. Plus, if the service isn't working for its users, I wouldn't say it's actually up.
Alternatively, and from the top of the HSBC homepage
"We would like to apologise for any inconvenience and continue to monitor the situation, which is also affecting other organisations."
At this point, the way I see it is:
- There's AWS
- There's Azure
- There's everything else
And I don't even use Azure, I just hear it's good (and they don't charge cross-AZ traffic)
For me it was Revolut. No access to my main account, no withdrawals, no card payments since the morning. App doesn't work, there's no phone number to call, nobody to talk to. Dark side of neobanking, I guess.
Not all neobanks. I use Monzo, and they had an outage a while back. I was impressed that it barely affected their functionality.
They have a stand-in system that uses a separate codebase and separate cloud provider. They have a blog post about it here: https://monzo.com/blog/tolerating-full-cloud-outages-with-mo...
The stand-in system has a limited subset of features, i.e. no bells and whistles, but enough that you can get any actual banking done.
(Not an ad / I have no connection to Monzo, I just had some appreciation for a bank doing this properly as normally banking IT is a disaster. Plus the idea of keeping a separate codebase for almost an entire bank's functionality seems very invested.)
I have always got bad vibes from Revolut...
Starling also has a disaster recovery system across cloud providers, although it is implemented differently to Monzo's (I used to work there on multi-cloud).
Multi-cloud is really tough, tbh. It's easier said than done, especially if you care about data consistency at all.
> I have always got bad vibes from Revolut...
I opened up a Revolut account a couple of years ago with the intention of switching my current account to it (i.e. wages going into it etc), but I got spooked after hearing that they weren't registered as a UK bank and thus subject to the various regulations and protections. I tried using Chase instead and have been happy with it so far.
I used to use Starling as my main and they were fine, until I started getting issues with random card declines due to "fraud prevention" and nobody to talk to. I switched to First Direct and like the peace of mind of having a human on the phone if needed (when I wanted to make a huge transfer for my house deposit it was nice to have!) and I still get perks like free foreign card transactions.
https://www.revolut.com/blog/post/revolut-is-officially-a-ba...
They are reigistered now
Countries talking about AI sovereignty, when they forgot compute sovereignty
I think sovereignty might be the _cause_ of the banks' outages...
This is affecting companies that put everything into a single GCP region in the UK for their entire business - aka most likely British companies or government with a data sovereignty requirement.
That's not sovereignty.
Sovereignty is when there is a UK company with multiple data centres in the country.
With that if one region goes down, another can carry on.
Redundancy does not seem like an inherent component of sovereignty
The UK, at least, is big enough that you can have multiple regions within the same country. There's a lot of distance between Glasgow and London, for example. Maybe not enough if both are targeted with nuclear warheads, but at that point, we have bigger fish to fry I suspect.
Most European countries have enough space within the country to do that, and, for most things, except banking typically, hosting within the EU is enough, it doesn't have to be within your own country.
Microsoft Azure has two entirely seperate regions.
A "full function" one in/around London. And a "tickbox" one for multi-region requirements near Cardiff.
The tickbox one has constant capacity constraints and a large number of Azure services aren't in it, but if you need to tick the "two regions and in country" requirement, you kinda/sorta can.
True on first glance.
But considering what these sovereignty rules aim to achive, and as someone mentioned, that the problem may be due to companies relying on a single region provided by a hypersclaler due to data sovereignity rules.
Then redundancy has to be considered by both the company and the rulers.
I couldn't unlock a shared city bike this morning on the Beryl system, probably the same outage.
Most likely it knocked out the "Ing" bank in Germany.
Ah again London region :D
Since there are no humans working on outages here is the test for superintelligence:
Can someone ask Claude, Codex, Copilot, Antigravity, Devin to resolve this outage?
No Googling or help from humans this time.