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)
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...
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.
It's like our on-prem systems were ordered to plan out and exercise DR plans to account for a data center going offline, but we can't exercise a DR plan fully if part of the plan is 'Adapt to how application X, which is hosted in the same datacenter, also chose to fail over.' We do not own application X. There is no appetite in the business to co-ordinate the DR exercise across the entire company at the same time.
We can't even do it all in a lower environment because there are dependencies on systems that are shared across environments. Some massive, redundant filesystem that is sync'd across our data centers, but the sync is a boolean. One datacenter instance of it is the primary and the others are read-only until they get promoted. We have one of these and lower environments are just a different root folder on the system with different access patterns, but they can't make DataCenter A the primary in prod and DataCenter B the primary in UAT.
The plan might've just been "if it gets bombed, we restore backups into other zone". Just waiting for it to fix itself for few hours mightv'e been acceptable risk.
I had a client that was contracting with a very large bank and there were only something like four zones globally that we could possibly deploy in to.
Google also is unlike AWS in that their zone abstraction is very virtual, and two zones might be in the same physical building. If you have requirements that your deployment zones be physically separated by some minimal distance then it can make things pretty challenging.
You will probably have issues logging into Llyods even when the cloud is back up.
The usability of their mobile app is atrocious though. Good thing they have a website.
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.
If I had a nickel for every solid-green status page I shook my fist at while the actual site faceplanted on every request...
"We would like to apologise for any inconvenience and continue to monitor the situation, which is also affecting other organisations."
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...
Multi-cloud is really tough, tbh. It's easier said than done, especially if you care about data consistency at all.
It sounds like that story could make a great blog post
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.
They are reigistered now
Another reminder that we need redundancy for all essential services that we rely on.
Perhaps this "bank" knows its phones would be down too.
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.
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.
A "full function" one in/around London. And a "tickbox" one for multi-region requirements near Cardiff.
The tickbox one has constant capacity constraints and a large number of Azure services aren't in it, but if you need to tick the "two regions and in country" requirement, you kinda/sorta can.
Wdym bigger fish, nuclear war has started and I can’t upload my video of a mushroom cloud to Tiktok!
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.
Sovereignty is just where stuff is, not how many place it is there.
But this is supposed to be about practical.
What's the purpose of ticking a box about housing data in UK when you can't make it available after a single incident.
Let me tell you a story about an idiot politician who woke up one day and thought Brexit would be a fantastic idea, and then the stupid dim-witted "ultra-hard brexit" manner in which it was implemented by a certain Mr Johnson.
The same reason UK people can't open EU bank accounts is the same reason EU banks have separate operating companies and infrastructure in the UK.
Given they operate in a heavily-regulated environment it almost certainly made life easier for them to keep UK stuff in the UK because they had no idea how (or if) the regulatory environment would ever progress beyond ultra-hard brexit.
In terms of upfront costs, cloud is always cheaper, initially. There's sort of a weird sweet spot for cloud. If you're to small it makes no sense operationally, if you're to large, it just way to expensive.
Even for large companies, if you have somewhat stable usage most of the year, but periodically have usage spikes, cloud providers still remain super beneficial.
That's the whole selling point of cloud. Spins up the resources when you need them. Spin them down when you don't. Cloud thrives off companies spinning up resources and never spinning them down, even when they don't need them anymore.
If you put everything into configuration management, make scalable, redundant and interconnected servers and services built on top of it, you unlock amazing possibility of one error bringing hundreds if not thousands machines down.
Nice lil reminder that adding more things for redundancy only increases it if they are entirely unrelated to eachother and independent.
Which INCLUDES not running same software. You can have redundant switches, doesn't matter if they have software bug that triggers on all of them (or just one in a way that prevents network from working correctly).
You can have database cluster that can tolerate node dying just fine but still be brought down by a bug despise redundancy.
Afaik, even Russia and Ukraine aren't having such issues while dealing with data centres getting droned, lol.
It's really quite poor performance.
Not having issues is overstatment, but Ukraine has a cheat of having a backup DC on NATO soil, which helps a lot.
They've had ~5yr to work on that.
The government should be resilience testing everything. Did Covid teach no lessons? Is the defence budget just for shits and giggles?
Can someone ask Claude, Codex, Copilot, Antigravity, Devin to resolve this outage?
No Googling or help from humans this time.
Fair, but if all of those 5 banks bought their own servers and put them into a datacenter that happens to be same one because it's the fancy one that meets all the bank regulations and required certs, that datacenter going down would still make 5 banks go down.
You would got some resiliency by fact only datacenter related issues (power, internet access) would affect it and not say "cloud company throwing AI at their code that proceeds to explode" (which already happened), but still, if you want to fix that, cloud or not, you have to have multiple locations/regions and that's both costly and difficult.
You misunderstand.
This is a provider outage, but the services running on them by the customers (that went offline) were not designed or setup to be multi-region.
The infra outage is GCPs fault, but application outages from customers are caused by their architecture and decisions prior to the outage.
- There's AWS
- There's Azure
- There's everything else
And I don't even use Azure, I just hear it's good (and they don't charge cross-AZ traffic)
AWS behind, but with us-east-1 outages.
Azure is extremely far behind those two, and mostly for non-tech legacy shops that got suckered.
I won't touch oracle cloud.
Its implementation is clumsy and ugly.
Its documentation is worse.
Its support… isn’t.
The documentation is indeed worst than that still. It’s a maze of articles, none of them actually answer your questions because in Azure the answer to everything is “it depends”. Every doc page has to also be a sales pitch for something. They love inventing skus and features that are basically “now if you want this service to work, you must enable this feature. Otherwise, this is not supported. And to enable this feature, you must delete and recreate your instance” you know, just figure it out.