Multiple companies hit by UK Google Cloud outage

(Sharecast News) - Banks and court video links were among services affected on Tuesday after Google's British cloud service suffered a major outage.

The tech giant confirmed that a "power event" had caused an outage at its cloud computing platform in the europe-west2 site in London.

According to outage tracking website Downdetector - which bases its findings on user reports - affected businesses are understood to include Halifax, part of Lloyds Banking Group, digital-only bank Revolut, Royal Mail, Rightmove and DPD.

Lloyds said it was aware of similar issues affecting other organisations and that it was monitoring the situation "closely". Revolut said a service disruption was affecting "multiple" services, but that customers' money and data were safe.

HM Courts and Tribunals Service confirmed it was aware of an issue affecting video links, while the Criminal Bar Association said many barristers in England and Wales had been unable to proceed with some hearings from 1000 BST as a result. "Our work to clear backlogs is hampered," it said.

In a statement on the Google Cloud platform, posted around noon BST, the US firm said the power event had been "mitigated" and that "full recovery of existing workloads should be completed, tentatively" within a couple of hours. "We apologise to all who are affected by the disruption," it added.

As at 1330 BST, shares in Google-parent Alphabet had dipped 1% in pre-marking trading on Wall Street.