Banking services, court hearings hit as power outage at Google datacentre in London causes widespread disruption

Disruption across services

The London datacentre outage was followed by problems affecting banking services, court hearings and the NHS app. Downdetector listed Royal Mail, Revolut, HSBC and Lloyds among services affected.

Revolut confirmed a disruption affecting multiple services and said customers’ money and data were safe. Lloyds said its app was working, while acknowledging that some people were having issues with certain online services.

Smaller than last year’s cascade

The outage had not reached the scale of a similar cascade the previous year, when Amazon Web Services went down for nearly half a day. The incident drew attention to the physical infrastructure behind digital services, which the report described as often creaking and provisional.

Concerns over dependence

Woźniak said a handful of very large companies had become deeply embedded in digital life, making it seem unimaginable to switch away from them. He argued that their outages can bring public institutions and large parts of the digital economy to a halt. Woźniak also pointed to an announcement from Google earlier in the year that 75% of its new code was “now AI-generated and approved by engineers”.