Google Cloud Outage Knocks Banks and Equifax Offline

Another outage at Google Cloud has rippled through a cluster of financial firms that rely on its infrastructure. According to the report, the online services of several organizations went down or became unstable at once — among them the UK banks HSBC, Bank of Scotland and Lloyds, the fintech firm Revolut, and the credit reference agency Equifax.

Incidents like this lay bare just how dependent the modern financial sector has become on a handful of cloud providers. When one of them stumbles, a wave of failures hits a whole range of outwardly unrelated services at the same time — from banks' mobile apps to credit-checking systems.

For customers it means the familiar set of frustrations: being unable to log in, make a payment, or reach an account until the provider fixes the problem on its end. The companies themselves can do little but wait alongside their users.

The Google Cloud episode adds to a string of high-profile cloud failures in recent years and once again raises the question of how much critical infrastructure is concentrated in the hands of a few giants — and what risks that concentration carries.

Source: Hacker News