Google UK outage: who is responsible when cloud apps fail?

On October 20, 2026, Google Cloud's London region (europe-west2) suffered a six-hour disruption that affected UK banking, retail, logistics and public sector services. Google attributed the incident to a power grid disruption at the data center hosting availability zone europe-west2-b, one of the region's three availability zones. It later clarified that this was a third-party (colocation) facility rather than a Google-owned data center.

Google's most recent update says the facility switched to UPS batteries, but both the programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and the backup PLCs failed to transfer the load to the diesel generators. As a result, europe-west2-b's servers, switches and storage went offline when the UPS battery reserves were depleted.