On October 19, 2026, Google Cloud reported a service disruption originating in the europe-west2 region, specifically affecting the europe-west2-b zone. The outage was triggered by a power event that caused a widespread loss of service for a variety of infrastructure and data products. According to the official incident report, the disruption began at approximately 23:08 PDT on Monday, October 19, and impacted a broad range of services including Cloud Run, Cloud Spanner, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and Cloud Storage.
The image represents the Google Cloud platform which experienced the power event in the europe-west2 region.
Google's engineering team identified the power event as the root cause and worked to mitigate the issue. By early Tuesday, October 20, the company reported that the power event had been mitigated and that they were prioritizing the recovery of existing workloads. While the outage was being addressed, customers were advised that they might experience elevated errors or intermittent network issues. During the peak of the disruption, some services remained unavailable in the affected zone, and customers were cautioned that they might not be able to create new workloads until full recovery was completed.
The incident highlighted the vulnerabilities of high-profile organizations that rely on specific cloud regions for their core operations. While Google Cloud provides multi-zone and multi-region architectures to ensure high availability, the outage demonstrated how a localized power event in a single zone can still impact services if workloads are not sufficiently distributed. Google Cloud's Service Health dashboard provides public status updates for such 'Broad Severe' incidents, which are defined as those having a global impact or affecting a significant percentage of customer projects across multiple regions. For customers seeking to minimize the impact of such events, Google recommends migrating workloads to different available zones or regions when feasible.
As of the final updates on October 20, Google Cloud reported that most workloads in the europe-west2 region were recovering. However, the incident serves as a reminder of the importance of geographic redundancy in cloud architecture, especially for critical infrastructure like banking and data management systems where even brief periods of unavailability can have significant real-world consequences.