EBA and FCA Launch Regulatory Inquiries Into Google Cloud Outage as Parliament's Treasury Committee Also Steps In
EBA and FCA Launch Regulatory Inquiries Into Google Cloud Outage as Parliament’s Treasury Committee Also Steps In #
European and British financial regulators have opened formal inquiries into a Google Cloud outage that left millions of bank customers unable to access services for several hours, marking the first significant test of new frameworks designed to oversee critical technology suppliers to the financial sector.
The European Banking Authority confirmed it had contacted Google Cloud to gather information about the disruption, understand its implications, and assess its potential impact on financial institutions across the EU, according to a Reuters report. Separately, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority said it was engaging directly with Google over the incident, while Parliament’s Treasury Committee wrote to both the Bank of England and the FCA requesting details on the regulators’ response, the scale of the disruption, and whether any financial harm to customers had occurred.
The outage, which took place on Tuesday, was caused by what Google described as a “power event” at a third-party facility within its europe-west2 cloud region, a London-based network that serves customers across Europe. Among those affected were Revolut, which counts roughly 13 million UK customers, as well as Lloyds and HSBC. Revolut noted that login attempts, card transactions and ATM withdrawals were impacted, though it stressed that customer funds and data remained secure. Google said services were restored after several hours and that it would publish a fuller analysis on its public status dashboard.
The inquiries come amid broader regulatory concern about concentration risk in financial services infrastructure. The EU designated 19 technology firms, including major cloud providers, as critical third-party providers to the financial sector last year, placing them under joint direct oversight of three regulators including the EBA. The UK introduced a comparable regime covering four cloud providers, with designated firms required to report serious outages to the FCA and the Bank of England.
Under existing UK rules, financial institutions themselves remain ultimately responsible for services delivered to their customers, even when those services depend on external technology providers. Analysts have noted that the episode illustrates how a single supplier failure can ripple across multiple institutions simultaneously, a systemic exposure that regulators in both the EU and UK have been working to address. Both the EBA inquiry and the FCA engagement are described as fact-finding at this stage, with no regulatory findings or breach determinations yet published.
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