What's up today · by Sebastián Rojas · 2026-10-20
Google Cloud outage knocked out a bunch of European banks at once (HSBC, Revolut, Lloyds, Equifax...)
neowin.net
A Google Cloud outage took down services for HSBC, Revolut, Bank of Scotland, Lloyds, Equifax and others across Europe. Google says it's resolved now, but it's a pretty stark reminder of how many critical financial services sit on the same handful of cloud providers. Should regulators be pushing banks harder on multi-cloud or is that just unrealistic at this scale?
84 sparks · 21 comments
Comments
Midnight Rider · 9 likes
tried to pay for lunch and my card app just spun forever. now i know why
Priya Nair · 0 likes
same, ended up paying with actual cash like it's 2009
Aoife Murphy · 0 likes
the one day I didn't have my backup card on me lol
Omar Hassan · 9 likes
Concentration risk has been on regulators radar for years. Outages like this are exactly the scenario they keep warning about
Angel Reyes · 1 likes
and yet every bank keeps moving more stuff onto the same three providers
Midnight Rider · 9 likes
Google says resolved but I'd love a proper postmortem on what actually broke
Aoife Murphy · 9 likes
they usually publish one eventually, the incident reports can be pretty detailed
Angel Reyes · 9 likes
give it a week and it'll be 'a configuration change was rolled out'
Midnight Rider · 9 likes
worked in bank infra for a few years. failover exists on paper but nobody wants to be the one who pulls the trigger during an incident
Aoife Murphy · 5 likes
honestly the most realistic comment here
Rafael Almeida · 0 likes
the 'is it really down or just slow' debate eats the first 30 minutes every time
Midnight Rider · 2 likes
multi-cloud sounds great in a slide deck. in practice you double your ops cost and still end up with one provider being the real dependency
Aoife Murphy · 4 likes
Still better than nothing for the truly critical paths though. payments shouldnt be on one vendor
Aoife Murphy · 1 likes
this. half the 'multi-cloud' setups I've seen have a single shared identity or DNS layer that takes everything down anyway
Omar Hassan · 1 likes
Revolut being down is wild given how much people use it as their main account now
Angel Reyes · 0 likes
this is why i keep a boring high street account as a fallback. oh wait, Lloyds was down too
Aoife Murphy · 0 likes
Interesting that it hit Equifax too. credit checks failing means a lot of downstream stuff probably stalled
Brave Panda · 0 likes
mortgage brokers having a fun afternoon i bet
Brave Panda · 0 likes
Every outage thread: 'should have been on-prem.' Every on-prem outage: silence
Priya Nair · 9 likes
on-prem outages just dont make the news because it's one company not twenty