Google Cloud multi-region outage disrupts HSBC Revolut Lloyds authentication for 87 minutes

The outage originated in Google Cloud's identity and access management layer across us-central1 and europe-west1. Services relying on Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy and OAuth token issuance lost connectivity at 14:42 UTC. Affected banks reported login failures and transaction processing halts until 16:09 UTC. Google published incident report INC-20241012-001 confirming the root cause as a configuration propagation error in its global control plane.

Bank statements and customer logs show 2.1 million failed authentication attempts during the window. Revolut recorded a 340% spike in support tickets. Equifax credit monitoring APIs returned 503 errors for 71 minutes. No data exfiltration occurred, but transaction settlement queues backed up by 4.8 million entries at affected institutions.

Financial regulators require 99.99% annual uptime under DORA and FCA operational resilience rules. This single incident consumed 0.016% of the yearly SLA yet exposed concentration risk when four of the UK's largest retail banks share the same identity provider. Prior similar events at AWS in 2021 produced identical multi-bank impact patterns.

Google has committed to phased rollout of control-plane changes and customer-managed failover tokens by Q1 2025. Banks are now required to file incident reports to the Bank of England within 72 hours.