Northern Ireland dodges worst of Google internet outage chaos, as banks and courts hit in England

Google has said it will investigate an incident that caused disruption to its cloud network after confirming most services are back up and running.

Multiple businesses that rely on the network experienced problems today, including banks and the courts in England and Wales.

But companies and services in Northern Ireland appeared to be largely unaffected, if at all.

Major banking names hit included HSBC and Lloyds, but the likes of Danske Bank and Ulster Bank did not seem to have been struck by major outages seen elsewhere.

On Downdetector, which tracks the functionality of websites, one or two people reported having difficulty with Dankse Bank and Ulster Bank in the late morning and early afternoon. By contrast, at that time HSBC had several hundred people across the UK complaining of outages, indicating a widespread issue.

And although a video-link platform used by courts in England and Wales went down, preventing trials from taking place, Stormont’s Department of Justice told the News Letter that Northern Ireland’s courts had “not been affected by the disruption to Google services”.

Google has apologised for the outage, stating a “power event” caused the outage in the “Europe-west2” region, believed to be a location in London.

The tech giant said the issue caused multiple cloud services to experience errors and intermittent network failures.

Google Cloud’s UK infrastructure is based in London and it was the only area to experience disruption.

But it had a knock-on effect on businesses that rely on the infrastructure for services such as computing, data management and services, as well as powering everyday systems.

By 3pm, Google said the issues had been largely resolved and only a very small number of customers were still being affected.

“We will publish an analysis of this incident once we have completed our internal investigation,” the company said on its service health page.

“We thank you for your patience while we’re working on resolving the issue.”

Mobile app-based banking company Revolut, which has millions of UK customers, was among the firms reporting problems caused by the incident.

The bank said multiple systems were down or partially unavailable, including card payments, transfers, cash withdrawals and signing into accounts.

More than 1,500 people reported problems with Revolut on Tuesday, according to Downdetector.

A spokesperson said: “We are currently experiencing a service disruption affecting multiple services.

“We can confirm that all our customers’ money and data are safe.

“We’ve been working to fix the issue since it was identified this morning and apologise to anyone affected and for any inconvenience caused.”

Hundreds of Lloyds Bank and HSBC users also reported issues to Downdetector, as well as platforms like Royal Mail, DPD and Rightmove, on Tuesday morning.

Sam Richardson, editor of Which? Money, said people will have been “rightly concerned” about the outages which could “prevent people making essential purchases or even paying their bills”.

He added: “Tech and banking outages have become increasingly frequent in recent years, and the impact can be widespread when they happen.

“It’s worth considering having back-ups in place in the event your main provider goes down – for example, a card with a different bank, and a small amount of emergency cash to tide you over.”