What happened
A report from Neowin, which reached the Hacker News front page, says a Google Cloud outage disrupted banking and other services across Europe. The headline names several well-known banks and a credit reference agency among those affected. We could not see the full article text, so we do not have the cause, the duration or the regions involved, and we will not guess at them.
Why it matters
Most of the companies in that headline have large engineering teams and still went down together. That is the point for a smaller company. If your product runs in one cloud provider, and often one region, a provider-side incident takes you offline however well your own code behaves.
Teams without a platform team tend to be exposed in quiet ways:
- Backups sit in the same account and region as production.
- DNS, authentication or a payment provider depends on the same cloud as everything else.
- Nobody has tried restoring from scratch, so recovery time is a guess.
- Nobody owns the question “what do we tell customers during an outage?”
Multi-cloud is not the answer for most small teams. It is costly and adds its own failure modes. The cheaper step is knowing what breaks, what you can live without, and how long a rebuild would take.
What to do this week
- List your critical customer paths, such as login, checkout and API, and write down which cloud services each one depends on.
- Check where backups live. At minimum, keep a copy in a separate account, and ideally a separate region or provider.
- Pick one service and run a real restore into a clean environment. Time it and note what was missing.
- Check third-party dependencies (identity, email, payments, monitoring) for hidden reliance on the same provider. Your status page and alerts should not go down with your platform.
- Draft a short outage runbook: who decides, who talks to customers, and where the status message gets posted.
Need a hand?
Working out what a provider outage would cost you, and what is worth fixing first, is the core of our Disaster Recovery work. We can review your setup, test restores with you and write recovery plans that match your budget. The first call is free and it is with an engineer.
Source: Google Cloud outage affects almost all banking and other operations in Europe
Related service: Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity