DOMINANT ANGLE
Madrid is gauging the Google Cloud outage by the blocked payments at Revolut and in British banks, linking it to an external American supplier.
Dominant angle identified — does not reflect unanimity of this country’s media
KEY POINTS
- 01
Revolut reported a disruption to card payments, transfers, ATM withdrawals, and crypto services, while indicating that account security was not compromised (Expansión).
- 02
Google attributed the incident to an electrical issue that took down the europe-west2-b zone in its London region, detected at 23:08 Monday, Pacific Time (Expansión).
- 03
Lloyds, Halifax, HSBC, Bank of Scotland, Royal Mail, DPD, and Rightmove reported difficulties; Sky News also cited NHS England, Asda, and GOV.UK with no established link to the outage (Euro Weekly News).
ANALYSIS
Madrid, October 20, 2026. The Spanish press is addressing the Google Cloud outage from its banking aspect. Expansión leads with Revolut, which reported on Tuesday an interruption affecting card payments, transfers, ATM withdrawals, and cryptocurrency-related services. According to the establishment, the security of accounts has not been compromised.
The economic daily specifies the technical origin with Google's words. The provider initially announced an in-depth investigation, then acknowledged problems with several services in the europe-west2 region, in London. The incident, detected at 23:08 Pacific Time on Monday, caused high errors and intermittent network failures. Google attributes it to an electrical incident that brought down the europe-west2-b zone. Expansión recalls that cloud data centers are divided into several availability zones to distribute loads and improve resilience.
The newspaper explicitly links Revolut to the American provider. Sources familiar with the situation indicate that the outage does not only affect Revolut and comes from an external provider. Reuters establishes the same link, which other market sources confirm to Expansión.
Euro Weekly News, an English-language media outlet based in Spain, adopts a tone closer to the daily life of users. It talks about "payment chaos": customers having difficulty paying, checking their accounts, and performing common operations. It lists Lloyds, whose application remained accessible for normal connections despite disruptions to certain services, Halifax, HSBC, Bank of Scotland, Royal Mail, DPD, and the real estate site Rightmove. It also cites, according to Sky News, complaints targeting NHS England, Asda, and GOV.UK, while warning that the link between each problem and the Google outage was not established.
The two sources remain descriptive. They barely quantify the financial impact and do not develop, in the available excerpts, the debate on European dependence on a few American providers: the emphasis is on the paralyzed services and the assurances given to customers.
