A major Google Cloud outage on Tuesday disrupted banking apps, delivery services and a range of other online platforms, leaving some customers in the United Kingdom unable to access services or complete transactions.

The incident affected several prominent UK services, including the fintech firm Revolut, Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Halifax, Bank of Scotland, Royal Mail, DPD and the property website Rightmove. NHS England and the UK courts' remote hearing service were also disrupted, according to international media reports, including Reuters.

The event illustrates how a technical failure at a single major cloud provider can ripple across businesses in multiple sectors that depend on the same infrastructure.

Google Cloud traced the disruption to a "power event" in its europe-west2 region, which is based in London. Regions like this are data-centre hubs that cloud providers run around the world, and that host their systems in a given region depend on it staying online. Problems began at around 6:08 a.m. GMT, with Google reporting errors and intermittent network failures affecting services in the region. The company later said its engineering teams had restored full service availability, and that it would provide further details once its investigation was complete. Those findings will be the next development to watch, offering the fullest public account of the power event and its effects.

Revolut, the UK-based fintech company offering digital banking, card payments and money transfer services, was among the companies affected. Some customers reported difficulties accessing services, making card payments and withdrawing cash from ATMs. Revolut said customers' money and data remained safe and apologised for the disruption as it worked to restore affected services.

Other financial institutions, including Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Halifax and Bank of Scotland, also experienced problems with some of their online services.

The impact extended beyond banking. Royal Mail and DPD users reported problems with delivery-related services, while customers also experienced disruption on Rightmove, one of the UK's largest property websites. Royal Mail said the incident had not affected its letter and parcel deliveries despite the reported online service problems.

NHS England's digital services were affected as well, underscoring the role cloud infrastructure now plays in supporting services that people rely on daily.

Although the outage was centred on London, its effects could reach businesses in other countries that rely on infrastructure hosted in the affected region. However, reports available so far have not identified any specific African banks or fintech companies affected by the incident.

The disruption adds to the risks businesses face when they depend on major cloud providers to run essential digital services. When an outage strikes a shared infrastructure provider, the consequences can spread across multiple companies and industries at once. Major cloud operators maintain many such regions globally, and spreading workloads across them is one way customers seek to limit the impact of a failure in any single location.