Bank of England and FCA pressed over a Google Cloud outage that took UK banking services offline

Google has resolved a cloud outage that affected UK banks and websites¹. Revolut was one of the hardest hit, with banking services going down for many customers¹. The failure knocked major British lenders offline, and the tech giant now faces regulatory scrutiny².

The Bank of England is investigating the outage^2,4. The chair of Parliament’s Treasury Committee has written to the Governor of the Bank of England and to the Chief Executive of the Financial Conduct Authority about it, and the committee has published the letter³.

Why it matters to investors

The episode moves cloud computing from a technology question into a question of financial stability. A single provider’s failure was enough to interrupt services at several banks and websites at once^1,2. That shared dependency is what has drawn the central bank in: the outage was not confined to one lender^2,4.

Analysis of the Revolut disruption has focused on three issues: the impact of the cloud outage itself, the security risks it exposed and the supply-chain dependencies that run through Google Cloud⁵. For investors in banks and fintech companies, those dependencies sit outside the firms’ own balance sheets but can still stop customers from reaching their money^1,5.

The Treasury Committee chose to write to the heads of both the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority, rather than to Google or to the affected banks alone³. Publishing the letter puts the outage on the parliamentary record and puts both regulators on notice that Parliament expects an account of what happened^2,3.

For Google, the scrutiny adds a regulatory dimension to an operational failure that it has already fixed^1,2. For the banks, the analysis of supply-chain dependencies is a reminder that their resilience depends in part on firms they do not control^2,5.

What to watch

The first item is the Bank of England’s investigation and whether it leads to new requirements for how banks manage reliance on outside technology providers^2,4. The second is the reply from the Governor and the head of the Financial Conduct Authority to the Treasury Committee chair, whose letter is already public³.

Investors will also watch for disclosure from affected lenders, starting with Revolut, about how many customers were affected and for how long^1,5. A further question is whether Google itself is called to explain the failure, given the regulatory scrutiny it now faces².