THE CRUNCH

Google Cloud is dealing with a significant outage in its London region, with multiple services throwing errors and no estimated time of recovery as of mid-morning. The disruption began at 0608 UTC on 20 October, and Google's status page reports elevated errors and intermittent network failures in the europe-west2 region.

The affected zone, europe-west2-b, is one of three availability zones in the London region. Such zones are meant to protect customers against hardware or regional failures, but services not configured for high availability that happened to sit in that zone were exposed, a point echoed by frustrated users on Reddit.

Google lists a wide range of impacted services, including BigQuery Data Transfer Service, Cloud Filestore, Cloud Run, App Engine, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, Google Kubernetes Engine and Managed Service for Apache Kafka. Its engineering team is investigating, and it has apologised to affected customers.

The blast radius extends well beyond direct Google Cloud customers. Down Detector reports problems at organisations including Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Royal Mail, Rightmove, DPD, BT, Cloudflare, Screwfix and Revolut. Revolut confirmed a service disruption affecting multiple services, saying customers' money and data are safe and that it had been working on a fix since the morning.

Google says there are no workarounds for now and plans to update customers at around 0930 UTC.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

Google planned to post its next customer update at around 0930 UTC, so the next status page entry is the thing to watch.