An outage at Google’s cloud services in the UK caused widespread disruption on Tuesday morning, hitting courts and leaving millions of customers unable to access or send cash at major banks including Lloyds, HSBC and Revolut.
A power fault stalled court hearings while Baybutt, a firm from Preston that supplies fresh fruit, vegetables and other produce to customers across the UK, could not access its website to download and process customer orders.
The outage will be the first major test for the FCA and the Bank of England since the City watchdogs were handed powers to regulate Google and other rival services supplying critical cloud services to UK financial firms this summer.
Google stated that services were restored for most users, adding that the company would publish an analysis of the incident on its service health dashboard, where it provides customers with updates about the status of its cloud services globally.
Thousands of reports of problems were raised by users online as banking customers reported issues ranging from being unable to access funds abroad to struggling to complete a property purchase.
The technical issues also affected a host of other popular UK platforms and services, with customers flagging problems with sites including Royal Mail, DPD and e-bike service Forest.
Officials noted that the latest incident shows how many businesses still rely on core services provided by a few large cloud operators.
Google stated: 'We continue to monitor the situation closely and thank customers for their patience.'.