A major internet outage appears to have taken down a whole range of websites and apps.
Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Screwfix and DPD were all hit by problems, according to tracking website Down Detector. Internet bank Revolut also appeared to be particularly affected, with customers unable to open the app or make payments.
At least some of the issues appeared to be because of a problem at Google Cloud, which operates internet infrastructure for a whole range of other services. It is unclear however whether all of the issues are related.
On its service status website, Google confirmed that that it was experiencing issues with its facilities in west Europe. It said it was “experiencing an issue with multiple services” and apologised to “all who are affected by the disruption”.
There is no workaround for now, Google confirmed.
It is the latest in a run of outages in which internet infrastructure companies experience problems that then take down large numbers of seemingly disconnected websites and apps. Similar incidents have happened in recent years at Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services, both of which offer similar tools to Google Cloud.
All of those companies offer the kinds of tools that websites need to run, but are largely invisible. They offer the kinds of networking and storage services that are required to allow users to connect to websites over the internet.
By doing so at large scale, all of those cloud services companies can offer those services more cheaply than if each individual website operator ran them on their own. But it also means that much of the internet depends on the same small number of companies – and an outage at any of them can take vast swathes of seemingly disparate websites offline.
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