Google Cloud says a 'power event' caused today's outage

Google Cloud has blamed a “power event” for taking down multiple online products for customers in Western Europe, and is pledging to restore normal service within the hour.

The unplanned downtime for customers began at 0608 UTC when europe-west-2-b, one of three local availability zones in the London region, started playing up.

According to an update on its status page, Google Cloud said at 1158 UTC that full recovery workloads should be “completed, tentatively” by 1300 UTC. Customers can expect another update at that point, with Google either giving the thumbs up, thumbs sideways or having to admit engineers are still working on a fix.

Services that went AWOL included BigQuery Data TransferService, Cloud Filestore, Cloud Run, Google App Engine, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Managed Service for Apache Kafka.

So what caused online services to melt at customers including Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Royal Mail, Rightmove, DPD, BT, Cloudflare, Screwfix and Revolut? Power.

"A power event caused …