- A major internet outage appears to have impacted different websites and apps, including Lloyds Bank, HSBC, Screwfix and DPD, according to Down Detector, with digital bank Revolut being particularly affected.
- At least some of the problems appeared to be because of an issue at Google Cloud, the web infrastructure division of the search giant, although it is not clear that all of the problems were related to that issue.
- Google Cloud confirmed on its status page that “multiple services” were “experiencing issues” in Western Europe, apologising to affected users.
- Similar incidents have occurred in recent years at Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services, with all these companies offering 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, these cloud services companies can offer those services more cheaply than if each individual website operator ran them on their own. However, this widespread dependency on a small number of tech firms means a single outage can disrupt vast swathes of the internet simultaneously.
IN FULL
