‘Too big to not fail’: Google outage exposes UK reliance on a handful of cloud providers

Our dependence on internet services of a few key tech companies leaves us vulnerable to cloud failures, bugs and more, experts say

It happened again. A power outage hit a datacentre in London, and things cascaded from there: multiple banking services faltered, court hearings were put on hold and patients reported temporary glitches on the NHS app.

The datacentre in question was in Google’s europe-west2-b zone, one of more than a dozen “zones” that the US search giant maintains in Europe to service its clients.