Rightmove and several major UK banks experienced service disruptions following a power failure at Google’s Europe-West2 data centre in London.
The property portal was among numerous websites and applications affected by the Cloud outage, which occurred yesterday morning. Google confirmed the issue stemmed from a power source problem at its London facility, which provides services to multiple countries across Europe and Britain.
Impact on property services
A Rightmove spokesperson stated: “Earlier today, technical issues affecting Google Cloud Platform across Europe impacted some of our logged-in services. These issues have now been resolved and all services are operating as normal. We thank our customers for their patience while we worked closely with our provider to minimise the impact.”
Competing portals OnTheMarket and Zoopla reported no disruption to their services.
Banking sector affected
The outage also affected Lloyds, Halifax, Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC and Revolut. It remains unclear whether property transactions involving these institutions were impacted during the disruption period.
Google confirmed most services returned to normal operation by mid-afternoon yesterday.
Pattern of IT disruptions
This incident follows a series of technology failures affecting property transactions. Last year, multiple property transactions were interrupted when IT issues hit several major banks on a Friday, traditionally a busy day for completions and when millions receive salary payments.
During that incident, Lloyds and Halifax banking applications became unavailable, whilst TSB, Bank of Scotland, Nationwide and First Direct experienced problems with online and mobile services, preventing customers from making payments or transferring funds.
Two years ago, property transactions in Scotland were disrupted by a cyber security issue at the country’s insolvency service. The IT failure lasted four working days, affecting any transaction requiring a search via the Register of Insolvencies.
The reliance on cloud infrastructure and digital banking platforms has increased operational risks for the property sector, with mortgage providers and estate agents increasingly dependent on uninterrupted technology services to complete transactions.
The Cloud facility model allows companies to store data at reduced costs compared to maintaining dedicated server infrastructure, though yesterday’s incident highlights the vulnerability of centralised systems to single points of failure.
