A power event in Google Cloud's London region took zone europe-west2-b offline for just over five hours on 20 October 2026, and caused elevated errors across the rest of the region. Parametrix monitoring detected the disruption at 06:03 UTC, recording a smaller rise in errors in the region's two other zones, which Google's status updates later acknowledged. Disruption was reported the same morning at UK banks, NHS digital services and HM Courts and Tribunals Service. Google has not confirmed which customers were affected.
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Google attributes the outage to a power failure in a single London zone. Its status page said: “A power event caused an outage within europe-west2-b zone”, and that “Google Cloud services are unavailable in europe-west2-b zone.” The impact did not stay inside that zone. Google also warned that “some services in europe-west2 region may experience elevated errors and intermittent network issues.” Google listed 38 affected products, covering compute, storage, databases, data processing and networking. Throughout the incident, Google's advice to customers was to move workloads to another zone or region.
The organizations below reported or were reported to have service problems during the outage window. Google has not confirmed any affected customers, so the link to this incident rests on timing and public reports.
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We detected the outage five minutes before Google's start time
Our monitoring signalled the disruption at 06:03 UTC, five minutes before Google’s own stated start time of 06:08 UTC - independent monitoring picked up the incident before the provider’s timeline even begins. We also recorded recovery at 11:39 UTC, 27 minutes after Google announced the power event was mitigated and inside the roughly 30-minute window Google predicted for partial mitigation to take effect. The total event duration was 5 hours 36 minutes.
One zone failed, but the whole region felt it
Our monitoring recorded a slight rise in errors in europe-west2's two other zones while europe-west2-b was down. Google's own status page describes the same effect: elevated errors and intermittent network issues across the region.
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