When “the Cloud” goes dark: Lessons from Google’s London Outage

Last Tuesday, a single power failure brought large parts of UK digital life to a halt. Google Cloud reported that a “power event” caused an outage in one zone of its London region, with 38 products listed as affected. Disruption was reported at UK banks, NHS digital services and HM Courts and Tribunals Service, while Revolut’s card payments and ATM withdrawals were among the services unavailable. Most services were back to normal around six hours after the incident began.

Notably, the failure did not stay contained within the one zone affected, which is exactly the scenario many businesses assume simply can’t happen with a major provider.

It’s a conversation we have with clients regularly. Many believe that being on Google Cloud, AWS or Microsoft Azure means they’re “safe”. The major cloud providers are highly resilient, but they’re not immune, and a global Amazon outage last year made parts of the internet inaccessible for several hours. Moving to the cloud transfers your risk; it doesn’t remove it.

The questions worth asking: Is your workload in one region or several? What happens if your provider’s region goes down? Have you tested failover, and how long could your business cope offline?

If you’re not sure of the answers, talk to us.