This is affecting companies that put everything into a single GCP region in the UK for their entire business - aka most likely British companies or government with a data sovereignty requirement.
Sovereignty is when there is a UK company with multiple data centres in the country.
With that if one region goes down, another can carry on.
But considering what these sovereignty rules aim to achive, and as someone mentioned, that the problem may be due to companies relying on a single region provided by a hypersclaler due to data sovereignity rules.
Then redundancy has to be considered by both the company and the rulers.
Most European countries have enough space within the country to do that, and, for most things, except banking typically, hosting within the EU is enough, it doesn't have to be within your own country.
You will probably have issues logging into Llyods even when the cloud is back up.
A lot of the information people are leveraging here comes from Downdetector which is mostly users reporting that stuff is down, not whether they are actually down. It's a really bad source.
"We would like to apologise for any inconvenience and continue to monitor the situation, which is also affecting other organisations."
We are experiencing an issue with multiple services in
europe-west2 beginning on Monday, 2026-10-19 23:08 PDT.
Due to a power event we had suffered an outage within
europe-west2-b zone. The power event is mitigated. Partial
mitigation to infrastructure services will be observed within the
next 30 minutes and the remaining services will be mitigated there
after.
(Also reporting the times in PDT is quite unhelpful for users of this zone who are likely based in the UK or EU)
Much as with backups - if you don't test them, they don't exist.
Everywhere I've worked has had multi-AZ infrastructure. I have never worked anywhere where the failure of an AZ has been simulated regularly, with second-order effects mapped out.
For example, AWS us-east-1 outages have caused global outages on multiple occasions, such as https://www.networkworld.com/article/4168878/aws-hit-by-us-e...
Can someone ask Claude, Codex, Copilot, Antigravity, Devin to resolve this outage?
No Googling or help from humans this time.
paweladamczuk•1h ago
Arbortheus•1h ago
They have a stand-in system that uses a separate codebase and separate cloud provider. They have a blog post about it here: https://monzo.com/blog/tolerating-full-cloud-outages-with-mo...
The stand-in system has a limited subset of features, i.e. no bells and whistles, but enough that you can get any actual banking done.
(Not an ad / I have no connection to Monzo, I just had some appreciation for a bank doing this properly as normally banking IT is a disaster. Plus the idea of keeping a separate codebase for almost an entire bank's functionality seems very invested.)
I have always got bad vibes from Revolut...
ndsipa_pomu•55m ago
I opened up a Revolut account a couple of years ago with the intention of switching my current account to it (i.e. wages going into it etc), but I got spooked after hearing that they weren't registered as a UK bank and thus subject to the various regulations and protections. I tried using Chase instead and have been happy with it so far.
misstuned•44m ago
altmanaltman•27m ago
They are reigistered now
m11a•29m ago
Multi-cloud is really tough, tbh. It's easier said than done, especially if you care about data consistency at all.